Strong Motion : A Novel

14

As a reward for getting her MBA and as consolation for having to start work at the Bank of Boston, Eileen had been vacationing on the Côte d’Azur with Peter. They rented a Peugeot at the airport in Nice and were delighted in Monaco, snubbed in Cannes, drunk in St. Tropez, and painlessly relieved of cash in the smaller towns along the way. At least once a day they ran into recent classmates of Eileen’s. They would be climbing a cobblestone hill past shops with bunches of dried lavender and Provençal scarves swinging and flapping in the mistral, and they would come upon a Roman ruin surrounded by cafés, and from the blinding aluminum chairs a chorus of female voices would chime: “Eileen! Eileen.” Peter would clench his teeth and mutter “Jesus Christ” and roll his eyes invisibly behind his Ray-Bans, because he thought Americans in France should be mute chameleons, but Eileen would step immediately into the shade of the plastic Cinzano or Pernod umbrella where the guys were sitting tight-lipped and training their Ray-Ban gazes on distant cypresses or an azure bay — just like Peter — and the girls were eager to exchange data on who all they’d seen from their class so far (ultimately Eileen saw or heard of a total of thirty-five of them, so the Cote d’Azur was a very popular reward for Harvard MBA recipients this year), while Peter, having crossed to the far side of the square, sunned himself on a block of marble hewn by Roman slaves.

Peter did, in fact, look very European, and Eileen knew he spoke fine French. But when they sat down in a cafe and a waiter came, Peter would look up and his lips would move a little bit, but no sound would come out, and the waiter, not being psychic, would turn to Eileen, who would say, “Uncaffay poor moi, ay oon Pernod poor lum,” and then, to Peter, in a whisper squeaky with exasperation, after the waiter had left: “You have to tell him what you want!” Whereupon Peter’s face would freeze into a smile so fierce and mocking and afraid that at length she felt sorry for him. She kissed his ear, tousled his hair, rubbed his thigh, and said she loved him. There ensued a silence, her face clouding up. “Do you love me?”

He grinned more fiercely yet and leaned across the table and gave her a not terribly welcome French kiss, still without having spoken a word since they sat down in the café.

In the afternoon they went to beaches. The question at a beach was always: Should she or shouldn’t she? She was an island of suburban-Chicago modesty in a sea of Euroflesh — Norman mammaries, Belgian genitalia shaded by overhangs of Belgian flab, Dutch teats that were tiny and quivered, uncircumcised Parisian penises that she studied with sly and helpless fascination. Peter reclined on his elbows, staring over his surfer trunks and tanned toes at the emerald waves, while she tried to make up her mind. “I’m going to do it,” she said finally.

Peter yawned. “That’s what you said yesterday.”

“Well but today I am.”

He stared at the waves.

Reaching behind her back with both hands, she took hold of the hook of her bathing-suit top. She sat like this for five seconds. “Should I do it?”

“Think carefully,” he said. “It’s an important decision.”

She pouted. “I’m not going to do it.”

He stared at the waves. She threw sand at him. He brushed himself off with light little sweeps of his fingers, as if his skin were a record he didn’t want to scratch. The next time he looked at her she was sitting upright on her towel, chin angled towards the sun, with her top on the sand beside her. They hardly spoke until they went back to their hotel, but there he pawed and clutched her body ardently, licking her breasts and climbing her, shuddering with lust like a dog while she smiled at the ceiling, unable to imagine a more perfect contentment.

The following afternoon she announced: “I’m not going to do it.” White glare from car chrome and café spoons and a certain someone’s Ray-Bans had been drilling into her head since breakfast. The hotel bed had been hot and full of expired alcohol fumes; she was also pretty sure she was getting a urinary-tract infection.

“It’s up to you,” said Peter, staring at the waves.

She chewed a fingernail and blinked morosely. Like her mother, no matter how tired she was, she had boundless energy for vacillation. “Do you think I should?”

In America, Peter was an expert and avid shopper, more certain than Eileen of how a 70/30 poly/cotton blend behaved and more patient than she in marching from store to store until the ideal shirt or shoes came to light. In Europe, however, he considered shopping merely the worst of many ways to blow one’s cover. When Eileen entered a store, he waited a full minute before drifting in after her, and then he knelt near the doorway and tied and retied his shoes as if he’d only come in because his laces were loose. He would page through the French-language editions of the travel books. (He thought this made him appear French.) Direct questions from Eileen elicited blank Ray-Ban stares of non-recognition. He gazed out the shop’s open doorway as if the thoughts of any Frenchman who had come in through such a door would immediately turn to leaving. (But the stores were often full of French people earnestly relating tacky souvenir items to historical battles or to the anthropology of Provence, and spending lavishly.) “It’s fine,” he’d murmur, referring to a gift idea, his eyes on the door.

“You haven’t even looked at it!”

“I trust your taste,” his lips unmoving, his eyes on the door.

The one gift that gave Eileen real trouble was Louis’s. Earlier in the month, when she’d had Louis and his girlfriend over for moussaka, she had neglected to mention that she and Peter were about to leave for France. The fact was that she habitually avoided informing Louis of the plans and acquisitions of property she was making; she always hoped that he wouldn’t ever find out about them; but of course she knew he always would. He would find out that while he was looking for a job and sweating in Somerville with a girlfriend who Eileen personally thought was awfully old for him, his sister had been having fantastic five-course dinners in the South of France. She therefore felt obligated to bring him something nice. At the same time, she could already imagine him making her feel stupid about whatever she decided to buy, because, after all, he had actually lived in France.

“Cognac,” Peter suggested.

“It has to be from Provence.”

“Wine,” Peter said.

“I have to think about this. I have to think.”

But the days passed with increasing rapidness, noon turning to nine, nine turning to noon, and she couldn’t ever seem to think. Finally, on the way to the airport in Nice, she dashed into a department store and bought Louis a large knife.

In Back Bay there was a message from him on her machine, instructing her to call him at his old number. An unfriendly person at his old apartment gave her a new number, which when she dialed it turned out to belong to Louis’s friend Beryl Slidowsky, on whose sofa, he said, he’d been sleeping for several nights.

“What happened to Renée?” Eileen asked, more innocently than meanly, though she really wasn’t sorry to hear he wasn’t living with her anymore.

“It’s a problem I’m working on,” Louis said.

“Oh. You’re trying to get back together.”

“I’m trying to get her back.”

“Oh, well — good luck.”

Louis said he was a fifth wheel at Beryl’s. He wondered if he could crash in Back Bay for a few days. One way or another, he said, it wouldn’t be for long.

“Um,” Eileen said. “I guess. But if you and Peter can’t get along, it’s not going to be very nice.”

“Trust me,” Louis said.

He came over in the evening after her first day at the bank. She had drunk half a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé while waiting for Peter, who still wasn’t home from work. When she let Louis in the door she immediately retreated, falling back on her legs as if the floor had developed a steep negative gradient. She couldn’t believe how much her brother had changed in three weeks. He was wearing his usual black jeans and white shirt, but he seemed taller and older and broader in the shoulders. He’d had his hair cut so short that what remained was dark and velvety, and for some reason he wasn’t wearing glasses. His cheeks were drawn, and dark with a week’s beard, his eyes hollow and shining in the absence of lenses, with gray satin semicircles of tiredness beneath them.

“I — got this tan in France,” Eileen said in a too-loud voice. It was the first thing that came into her head.

“Yeah, I heard you were over there,” Louis said without interest.

“What happened to your glasses?”

“Somebody stepped on them.”

“Have you had dinner?”

“If it’s OK with you,” he said, “I think I’ll be by myself for a while. I can come out later.”

At eleven o’clock he still hadn’t come out. Eileen left Peter in bed with the news and tapped on the door of the second bedroom. Louis, minus his shirt, was bending low over the desk they had in there and writing in a notebook. At the top of the notebook page she could read the words Dear Renée. He didn’t try to hide them.

“I brought you something from France,” Eileen said. Jet lag and drinking and the day’s terrors of job orientation had conspired to puff her eyes up and reduce her skin to red shininess. She handed Louis the box with the knife in it.

He frowned. “This is very nice. You got this for me?”

“It’s for your kitchen. You have to pay me a penny for it. It’s the superstition. You have to pay me for it or it’s bad luck.”

Obediently, unhurriedly, he took a penny from his pocket and held it out to her. But she had turned away towards the convertible futon sofa. She was looking at Louis’s small nylon duffel bag, which was now apparently the size of all the possessions that mattered to him. “You’re really broken up about her, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Louis said.

“Did you want to tell me what happened?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did you want me to do something? I could try and talk to her, if you wanted.”

“It’s OK.”

She nodded; but it was more like her heavy head just falling forward. She stared at the floor and spoke in a low, trembling voice. “You know, you’re very, very cute, Louis. There are lots of girls who’d think you’re totally cute. And you’re smart, and independent, and strong, and you’re interesting, and you’re going to do anything you want. Lots and lots of girls are going to want to go out with you. You’re going to go to Europe again and you’ll be really confident. You’re going to have a good life. Did you know that?” She shot him an accusing look. “I used to feel sorry for you. But I don’t anymore. I know you’re all broken up about her, but I don’t feel sorry at all. So just try to feel OK. I mean I guess I hope you get her back, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t.”

Louis sat and looked at her with the submissive sadness of a pet who knew he had damaged property but had never meant to. Eileen put her hand on the doorknob, not turning it but holding it as though it were a mother’s hand. “I don’t know why you make me feel so rotten.”

“I’m not trying to,” Louis said.

“You make me feel so rotten,” she insisted. “You make me feel so bad about myself. You always have, all my whole life, my whole, whole life,” she’d begun to cry, “and I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want you to stay here. I want you to find someplace else to stay. I have to go to work every day now. I have to go to this horrible stupid bank every single day with no vacation for ten months, and if I want promotions I have to work at night and Saturdays. And I just don’t want you to make me feel so bad. You can stay here as long as you want, but I wanted you to know.”

“I’ll leave right now,” he said calmly.

“No. You have to stay. I’ll feel guilty if you go. But I don’t want you here. I don’t know what I want.” She stamped her foot. “Why am I suddenly so unhappy? Why do you do this to me?”

“I’ll go.”

She spun around and, purple-faced, bent over him and cried, “You stay here, you stay here, you’re not going anywhere! You can’t go. You don’t have anyplace to go. You stay here because you’re my brother and I don’t want you to go. If you go I’ll never ever ever forgive you.”

Then the door slammed and Louis was left alone in the room, squeezing the penny he hadn’t given her.

For three days they kept out of each other’s way. She left in the morning before Louis was awake, and he returned from a day of what she assumed was job-hunting at eight or nine at night and went straight to his room. By Thursday afternoon she was feeling attractive and remorseful again. She came home with her new French string bag filled with food and was surprised to find Louis in the living room. Was it possible that he’d been spending his days not job-hunting but watching TV? He was wearing his glasses again, and sitting with bowed head and folded hands on the sofa facing the video equipment, which was silent.

“I hope you haven’t eaten dinner,” she said.

He gave no sign of having heard her. He stared at the slatefaced TV and rubbed his thumbs together.

“Is something wrong?” she said, resisting an influx of irritation.

His mouth opened, but only silence came out.

“Well, I’m making a nice dinner,” she said. “So I hope you’ll be ready to eat it.”

As soon as she went to the kitchen she heard the front door open and close. She turned on the kitchen TV and put a Perdue chicken in the oven (in France she’d learned that you could have warm meat in salads — poulet, canard, and the like), and then for a few minutes she forgot where she was and what she was doing, because of the news on Channel 4.

…was tragically gunned down in what police are calling the worst outbreak yet of pro-life violence. Penny Spanghorn is standing by, live, at the scene of this tragic, tragic shooting. Penny?

Jerry, this afternoon Renée Seitchek went to New Cambridge Health Associates in Cambridge, where the so-called Church of Action in Christ was performing the latest in its series of illegal door-blocking actions. Police arrested twelve demonstrators for attempting to harass Seitchek. At about five o’clock Seitchek came out of the clinic and spoke with reporters in what was said to be a very emotional confrontation. She stated that she’d had a — she had terminated a pregnancy. Tragically, it now appears that she may have paid for this statement with her life. At about five-thirty she returned to her home here on Pleasant Avenue in Somerville, where she was greeted with a hail of gunfire from an unidentified assailant in a parked car across the street. Shortly before six o’clock, Channel 4 News received an anonymous phone call from an extremist group taking credit for the tragic shooting, and I quote: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Somerville police say they received a similar phone call at about the same time.

Eileen stared, stricken, at Penny Spanghorn. She was weeping over the arugula and radicchio in her salad spinner — weeping not just for Renée and Louis but for herself as well — when Peter came home from work. She told him that Renée was in critical condition with severe chest and abdominal injuries.

“Shit,” he said, paling. “Is that horrible?”

“It’s so rotten. Everything is so, so rotten.”

“It is truly horrible all right.”

The Church of Action in Christ, said Philip Stites, condemns the wicked and cowardly shooting of Renée Seitchek this afternoon. We in the church deplore all forms of human violence, whether it’s violence against an unborn baby or violence against a citizen of the Commonwealth. Renée Seitchek is a woman of conscience and a creature of God. We mourn her injuries, and we extend our deepest sympathy to her family and friends and join them in sending her our prayers and love.

It was after midnight when Eileen and Peter, watching but not listening to Arsenio Hall in their airconditioned bedroom, heard Louis come in. Eileen went to see him. She was wearing her favorite summer nightshirt, a light cotton Bennington jersey, extra large.

Louis was sitting on the floor of his room, applying a folded Kleenex to the bleeding, popped blisters that covered both his feet. His sweat-soaked shirt was spattered with blood and clung tightly to his breast. His black oxfords, dusty and exhausted-looking, lay next to him. Apparently he hadn’t been wearing any socks.

“Are you hurt?” Eileen said.

“They shot Renée,” he answered in a thin, parched voice.

“I know. I know. I can’t stop crying.”

“They shot Renée.”

“But she’s OK, Louis. They said she’s OK,” although this wasn’t strictly accurate. Channel 4 would only say she hadn’t died yet.

Louis prodded the raw flesh of his feet, tearing at the ragged skin with his fingers. Eileen, watching, felt as if she’d fallen and no one would help her. Even though they were suffering so much more than she was, it seemed to her that Louis and Renée had teamed up to rob her of an inheritance. She felt a flash of jealousy and anger, and in its light she saw that there was an absolute standard of goodness in the world, an ideal that she was infinitely far from achieving. Louis continued to press his thumbnails into his candy-red sores for no other purpose than the pain it brought him. She knew she had to stay with him and comfort him, but she couldn’t bear to see him do that to his feet, and so she left him and lay down by Peter and let guilt and darkness swallow her.

He had run down the stairs and out onto Marlborough Street. The twin lines of brick town houses stretching to the west framed a yellow sun whose plasma had condensed in drops on green thunderstorm-soaked shrubs, in steaming beads on car hoods, in brilliant, smoking sheets on asphalt. A boom box in a basement window rang with the clash and assonance of Sonic Youth. Running, he saw the red high-tops and black roller skates of urban students, the white bunny feet of women in their commuter sneakers, the stiletto heels and penny loafers of real-estate agents, the paws of dogs, the laceless half-soled boots of men with no address. Keys jingled and car doors closed. A man (it had to be a man because hardly any women did it) whistled.

He ran up Mass Ave. and over the river down which a flood might just have roared, flushing all the rental sailboats and waterlogged McDonald’s trash into the sewer of Boston Harbor and leaving in its wake an earthy freshwater pungency. He pushed through the sluggish crowds vented by the subway at Central Square, ran up past the battalion of Volvos and Subarus soon to be carrying free-range chickens and baby zucchini away from Bread & Circus on Prospect Street, and up through the population densities surrounding Inman Square, where Portuguese immigrants and obese native East Cantabrigians mingled with Harvard comparative-lit grad students no more easily than Pastene Brand olive oil mixes with Poland Spring mineral water, and mufflers leaked or scraped on the pavement, and there were suspicious blackish sediments in every puddle, and a blond bearded youth with a lavender bandanna around his neck walked down the middle of the sidewalk singing “Sugar Magnolia” loudly.

By the time he crossed Union Square the sun had fallen into clouds, leaving a humid dusk that smelled of car exhaust and spoiled fruit. He limped up Walnut Street, neck outstretched, feet barely clearing the sidewalk joints, heart working shallowly, futilely, as though his blood in its heat had become too thin to pump. Near the summit of the hill he began to pass cars that had slowed to squeeze past or gawk at the Channel 4 and Channel 7 vans parked just short of the corner of Pleasant Avenue. A squad car blocked access to the street. A second squad car and the less overtly marked sedan of Somerville’s police chief stood just beyond number 7’s chain link fence and its burden of honeysuckle and crime-scene tape. Across the street an officer was taking pictures of the gutter, in which, as one bystander explained to another, some shell casings had come to light. A detective was transferring to a form on a clipboard the eager statements of two boys, one pint-sized and one gallon-sized, whom Louis recognized as the male contingent of the twenty-four-hour haunters of the front porch opposite number 7.

“One-seventy-six D V N, green on white,” the larger boy was saying. “I wrote it down, see, one-seventy-six D V N. See? Right here. One-seventy-six D V N.”

All of Pleasant Avenue had collected behind the crime-scene tape. There were the endo- and ectomorphic teenaged girls blowing bubbles the size and color of babies’ heads, the silent workingmen with whiskey sunburns and lips pursed in resignation. There were educated mothers holding Alexes and Jessicas in their arms, size-18 heads of household whose uncharitable view of the world the tragic shooting had confirmed, a pair of twin albino Mormons with their briefcases, and a quartet of wiry Africans in shiny shorts and knee-high stockings, the smallest of them carrying a soccer ball. As soon as Louis had caught his breath a little and stilled the quaking of his knees, he pushed his way up to the tape. Through the open gate of number 7 he saw the blood on the drying concrete walk, diluted and smeared by the rain like red watercolor paint. He saw blood darkening the edges of the triangular puddles in the depressed corners of the sidewalk squares. He saw a faint and mottled band of it on the face of the lowermost concrete step. He gave a sharp, brief cry of pain and disbelief. A cop talking to the somber Penny Spanghorn and her camera-headed companion was making dramatic gestures with his arms, aiming his finger like a gun.

“Where did they take her?” Louis said.

“Somerville Hospital,” replied several people at once.

Headlights were coming on among the eastbound cars on Highland Avenue, paired pure white spots seeming to emerge straight from the blood in the sky above the distant Davis Square. Looming above dark side streets and dark trees with moodily shifting branches and streetlights still in the early pink stages of ignition, the hospital projected from the slope of Somerville’s central ridge like a tanker at twilight, the lighted windows and dozen bristling antennas of its bridge-like tower signaling life and vigilance on the dark, deep ocean. In the parking lot outside the emergency room, the hydraulics of a Channel 5 van were purring as it retracted its dish.

The hospital’s small lobby was furnished with oblongs of foam upholstered in electric blue. Howard Chun was slouched on one of them. There was blood on the knees of his yachting pants and bright smears of it on his thighs, where, like a butcher, he must have wiped his hands.

“Where is she?” Louis said.

Howard cocked his head towards the interior of the hospital. “Surgery,” he said. He stood up and began to circle the waiting area, tearing a leaf off a potted plant, doing vertical push-ups against the windows, stopping to drive his bloodstained knees into the foam of various oblongs, and telling Louis what he’d seen. He didn’t sound like someone who loved or liked or knew Renée or was even particularly thinking about her. He was like an adolescent who until now had seen violence only in Hollywood movies and so was driven to recount the dreadful thing he’d just seen the world do, to convey the impact to Louis, to try to impress or harrow or hurt the person who hadn’t been there and who it was obvious did love her and who could imagine whatever details he left out.

She was lying on her side at the bottom of the stoop of number 7. Her legs were tucked up and her wrists were crossed across her chest and there was blood soaking through her jeans above one knee and blood covering the forearm she had pressed to her stomach. The kids across the street had already called 911 and were standing right behind Howard, giving him conflicting and specious pieces of advice. Renée was producing the lonely, high-pitched, unaffected moans of a really sick child. Her face was the color of cold bacon grease sweating in a humid room. She said Howard and Get somebody and It hurts, it hurts. Then she stopped speaking and her breath rasped loudly in her windpipe and the paramedics came and dislodged Howard, the broad male backs in white shirts dwarfing the little package of dwindling female life as they tried to sort her out. They gave her oxygen through her nose and attached her to a portable monitor. They exchanged data orally, blood pressure 80/50, pulse 120, respirations 36. A lobed tide of blood was spreading across the concrete, seeming to boil as the raindrops fell. Questions: Could she breathe? Did she have feeling in her legs? Where did it hurt? She blinked and winced as the rain fell in her eyes. In a timid voice, as if daring to disturb them only because it seemed important, she asked them if she was going to die. A white shirt said, “You’ll be OK.” He said, “You got the Ringer’s?” While the police took names and addresses from Howard, Renée was strapped into the ambulance with wide-bore IVs in both her arms. Her T-shirt and bra and one pants leg had been cut away, and a thick square of gauze beneath her right breast was soaking up her blood. Howard sat with his knees nearly in his face and his hand on her chilled wet forehead as the siren came on and surged hopefully upward in pitch and volume. The clear plastic tubes wagged with the undulations and irregularities in Highland Avenue. A white shirt said, “Renée, you’re doing great.” But her teeth were chattering and she didn’t answer.

“You know what they do?” Howard said. He rebounded from a blue oblong and checked Louis for a reaction. “They take a tube, got a sharp point. They stab it through the ribs. She’s awake, they stab it right through. Then they start putting suction. I heard her when they did it. Police was there, we heard it.”

He checked again for Louis’s reaction. Louis’s face was no longer flushed from the run, but he was sweatier than ever. He panted and followed Howard fearfully with his eyes as if Howard had been physically torturing him. He said, “Do you hate her?”

“They take her surgery,” Howard said.

“I asked: Do you hate her?”

Howard scrunched up his face. “What you think?”

Louis couldn’t bear to look at him, couldn’t bear to hear another of his short, croaking sentences. “I wish you didn’t exist,” he said.

“They started six-thirty,” Howard said.

Louis put his fingers behind his glasses and rubbed his eyes. A repulsive field drove him toward the automatic doors, but when he passed Howard he swung around and shoved both his fists into his ribs, giving him a shove intended to land him on his back. But there was a lot of inertia to Howard. He staggered and caught himself from falling just as Louis charged in and met, quite unexpectedly, a wicked slap across his left cheek followed by another across his right. “Uh!” he said, swinging blindly as his glasses sailed away. Howard had a height advantage. He was able to keep shoving Louis in the head and collarbone and shoulders, knocking him back each time he charged, retreating in a circle around a cluster of blue oblongs. “Stop fighting me,” he said in a crabby, priggish bark. “Stop fighting me.” Louis grabbed his shirt and landed several solid jabs to his gut. Howard whaled away at his cheeks with his open hands, but here Louis’s superior tolerance of pain came into play, as he withstood the increasingly earnest slaps and managed to topple Howard into an oblong and then onto his back and, grunting with exertion, pinned Howard’s arms with his knees and began to pummel his cheeks and nose and ears and eyes but did not pay enough attention to the pinned arms, one of which worked free and delivered a ringing blow to the side of his head, which was followed by a frightening and irresistible loss of breath as a third party, shouting “What the hell are you doing?” got a choke hold on him and dragged him off Howard, raising him onto his toes and threatening to raise him higher before he finally went limp.

“What the hell are you doing? There’s sick people here, there’s hurt people here. Look what you done to this fella. You oughtta die with shame doing a thing like that here.”

Howard’s nose was like a decanter, well behaved while he was on his back but pouring a stream of blood onto the carpeting as soon as he sat up.

“You still got that devil in you? Or you gonna leave off now?”

“It’s OK,” Louis gasped, limp.

“Sheesh,” said his captor, releasing him and dropping to his knees by Howard. He shook open a handkerchief and applied it to the bleeding nose. “Pinch it, pinch it.”

Louis straightened the frames of his glasses, which were brand-new and had cost him most of the cash his father had given him when he left Evanston. Putting them on, he confirmed that the man who’d been choking him was Philip Stites. Drops of Howard’s blood had fallen on the minister’s khaki pants. He looked up at Louis reproachfully and then he did a double take, his expression softening as he squinted through his tortoiseshells, trying to place him.

“News with a Twist?” Louis said.

“Ah. The Antichrist. You find yourself another job?”

“Nope.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that,” Stites said glibly, losing interest. He stood up and smoothed back his corn-silk hair. “Neither of you wouldn’t happen to be here to see how Renée Seitchek’s doing?”

Neither Louis nor Howard answered. Howard was reclining against an oblong and squeezing his nose as if something stank here. He raised his narrowed, red eyes and looked at Louis with the intimacy shared by lovers and others who grapple on the floor.

“What’s it to you?” Louis said to Stites.

“I take it that’s a yes?”

“Take it however you want,” Louis said. “What’s it to you?”

“Well. I guess that’s a fair enough question. I can tell you I saw Renée a couple nights back, and I saw her today, and I think it’s a terrible thing what’s happened. And I want to pray for her. And I want to know she’s alive.”

“Ask at the desk.”

“Well now.” Like a bully who’d scented a weakling, Stites awakened fully to Louis’s presence. He approached him with the same prowling, intent, and possibly myopic tilting of head that Louis himself assumed when he felt he had a moral edge on someone. “You must be the boyfriend.”

“You can talk,” Louis said. “But I don’t have to listen.”

“You must be the boyfriend she told me about on Monday, and the one she told the world about today.”

Louis blanched a little, but held his ground. “Today,” he said. “You mean — when you guys were calling her a murderer.”

“On Monday,” Stites raising his voice, “when she told me there was a man who’d hurt her so bad she didn’t want to live anymore. And today when she said there was a man she was in love with and wanted to marry and have children with, and I didn’t see any man there with her. And I reckon you’re the so-called man. Aren’t you.”

Louis looked into the minister’s light-soaped, accusing tortoiseshells. “You can’t make me feel guiltier than I already do.”

“Your guilt is your business, Mr. Antichrist. I’m just telling you why I’m here.”

The so-called man whom Renée had been in love with and had wanted to have children with turned away from Stites. Conscious of an impulse to redeem himself in the minister’s eyes, he crouched by Howard. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Howard gave him another red, intimate look and said nothing. Stites had disappeared up the corridor. Louis found him sitting on a sofa in a tiny ICU waiting room with a television mounted on the ceiling. “What did she say about me?” he said from the doorway.

Stites didn’t take his eyes off the television. “I told you what she said.”

“Where’d you see her?”

“Chelsea.”

“She wanted you to call your people off her.”

“That’s what she came for, sure. But that’s not why she stayed.”

“She stayed?”

Stites smiled at the television. “What’s it to you?”

Louis looked at the floor. Not for the first time, he felt he was out of his depth in loving Renée.

“Jody batting.355 over the last eight games,” said the television. “He’s four for his last nine.”

“She stayed, we talked,” Stites said. “Then she left. Where were you?”

“I left her. I hurt her.”

“And now she’s shot and you decide you feel bad about it.”

“That’s not true.”

“What’s your name?”

“Louis.”

“Louis,” Stites spread his arms out on the top of the sofa and put his feet up on a coffee table, “I ain’t your rival. I’ll tell you frankly, I thought a lot of her. But she wasn’t interested in me as a man. She was totally faithful to you. I don’t know about if you didn’t exist. But you do exist, so.”

“If I didn’t exist you’d have to explain to her why one of your people shot her in the back because she had an abortion.”

“That was not a pro-life person,” Stites said positively, to the television screen, where the Red Sox batter was trying to lay down a bunt.

“‘An eye for an eye’?”

“I don’t believe it,” Stites said. “I flat-out don’t believe it. That’s not how we work, even the worst of us. I’d frankly sooner believe it was you.”

“Appreciate it.”

“The only question is, who else is gonna do a thing like that? You got any idea at all?”

Louis didn’t answer. On the TV screen a Volvo sedan was crashing into a cinder-block wall, and a plastic married couple and their bald plastic children, not dead, not even scratched, were settling back comfortably into their seats.

“What’s she like?” Stites asked him. “Day to day?”

“I don’t know. Neurotic, self-absorbed, insecure. Kind of mean. She doesn’t have a great sense of humor.” He frowned. “She’s a good scientist. A good cook. She doesn’t do anything without thinking about it. She’s very sexy too, somehow.”

“A good cook, huh? What kinds of things she cook?”

“Vegetables. Pasta. Fish. She doesn’t eat the higher vertebrates.”

Out in the Sahara, two young men dying of thirst were rescued by a Budweiser truck carrying beautiful girls in swimsuits and tight cutoffs and halter tops. Everybody was drinking product. The girls’ breasts were firm and round and their stomachs flat and hard and their waists narrow in their Silera maillots. Their limbs sweated like cool, intoxicating beer cans. The men flooded sundry cleavages with a fire hose, spanked asses with the hose’s white spray. The cheesecake, drinking product, was losing inhibitions. Forty feet away, on the table in OR #1, a urologist named Dr. Ishimura was sewing up the place in Renée’s body where her right kidney had been, and a surgeon named Dr. Das was vacuuming up her blood.

15

He was awakened in the morning by the machine by his bed. His amplified mother was shouting at Eileen about some State Farm policy: AND I NEED YOUR WORK NUMBER SO—

“Hello Mom,” he said over a squawk of feedback as he deactivated the machine.

“Louis? Where are you?”

He coughed. “Where do you think?”

“Goodness, yes, that’s a silly question. How — how are you?”

“Well. Apart from the fact that my girlfriend was shot in the back last night and almost died, uh.”

There was a silence. He could hear mid-morning birds chirping on Argilla Road.

“Your girlfriend,” Melanie said.

“You probably saw it on the news. Her name’s Renée. Seitchek. Remember you met her?”

“Your girlfriend. I see.”

“She had an abortion, and somebody shot her. And you know who the father was?”

“Louis, I—”

“It was me.”

“Well, Louis, that’s — that’s very interesting. For you to tell me that. Although according to what I read in the paper she had some uncertainty—”

“She only said that to take all the responsibility.”

“I suppose that could be the case, Louis, although you shouldn’t—”

“She said it because she’s a conscientious person who takes responsibility for everything she does.”

“Yes, I’m quite familiar with Renée’s conscientiousness.”

He sat up. He swung his bandaged feet to the floor. “What do you mean? Have you been talking to her?”

“As a matter of fact,” Melanie said, “I saw her the weekend before last, and then again last week. But that’s not what’s important now.”

“You saw her?”

“What’s important is that she recover. That’s what you have to think about.”

“You saw her?”

“Yes, but it is not important.”

“My girlfriend is in the hospital and she almost died and you won’t tell me what’s going on?”

“Louis, she gave me some advice.”

“Advice. Advice. She told you to sell your stock.”

There was no reply except for birdsong. The birds might have been perched on his mother’s shoulder, they sounded so close. “She told you to sell your stock,” Louis said. “Right?”

“Well, yes, I see your father has given you a clear picture of the extremely private dilemma I was facing. And it’s exactly as you say: she advised me to sell my stock.”

Louis hobbled to the desk and sat down. “She gave you the advice? Or did she sell it?”

“You may ask her that yourself, Louis. I’m not going to tell you.”

“She was in surgery for four hours last night. She’s in, like, horrible shape. And you want me to ask her?”

“I don’t see what conceivable difference it could make to you. All I’m going to say is that I do not recall the precise arrangement we had.”

“Meaning she sold it to you.”

No reply.

“Did she tell you she knew me?”

“She said that you and she were not involved.”

“Well, we aren’t, strictly speaking.”

“She also said that you and she had not been involved.”

“Well, she lied.”

“Well, and I suppose I knew that. I suppose I knew it all along.”

Louis hung up and clutched his forehead, which had begun to ache. The bathroom was still steamy and herbally scented from Eileen and Peter’s showers. Alongside Peter’s French skin-care products (“poor lum”) and the wide variety of makeup pencils and brushes and pancakes that Louis had been a little surprised to discover Eileen used, he saw the bloodstained washcloth, the empty box of sterile bandages, the wastebasket full of Kleenexes stained with blood and Betadine, the evidence of the quarter hour he’d spent here before he went to bed. He saw the sun in the window. He pictured Somerville Hospital in the daylight, the daylight of a holiday — Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July — that had fallen on a weekday, when the plug is pulled on ordinary activities, and the empty white hours stretch out towards the evening’s obligatory turkey, the night’s fireworks, or, in this case, the afternoon’s visit to the hospital. They’d told him there was a chance he’d be able to see Renée briefly. He raised the toilet seat, which like every other horizontal surface in the bathroom was dusted with the baby powder Eileen had been using on summer mornings for at least twelve years, and he was just beginning to pee when the telephone rang again. He returned to his room.

Hi, this is Lauren Bowles—

He reached for the receiver, but his fingers curled into a fist. He felt how an object, a chair, must feel, the fibers of its wooden members tensed, its arms and legs paralyzed by the geometry of equal and opposing forces. Watching his fingers nonetheless uncurl and raise the receiver was like watching a chair move in an earthquake.

“Hello?” Lauren said. “Hello?. Hello? Is someone there?”

“It’s me, Lauren.”

“Oh God, Louis, you sound so far away. Are you alone? Can I talk to you?”

Now his lips were the stationary object.

“Are you there?” Lauren said. “I was going to wait to call you like you said to, but I was watching Good Morning America and I saw her. It’s so bad, Louis, it’s really really bad, because I’d just been thinking how I wished she didn’t exist. But they said she’s alive. Right?”

“Yes.”

“You know they called her a hero? Like, Louis’s girlfriend is such an incredibly good person they put her picture on TV and say she’s a hero. Like she’s one of the best people in the country or something. And I’m such a good person I’m sitting there wishing she was dead, right up to when I actually saw her.”

“Yeah, Lauren,” he said harshly. “You shouldn’t listen to what they say. She had that abortion to be spiteful. She uses men for sex. She has a smaller heart than you do.”

Lauren was hurt. “I don’t believe you,” she said. It was the first time he’d ever tried to hurt her. He wanted her to hate him and forget him. But it wasn’t pleasant to be hated, at least not by Lauren, whose goodwill towards him had always been a mystery that made the world seem like a hopeful place. He’d be very sorry to live without that goodwill. He asked her where she was.

“I’m at home. I mean with Emmett. I haven’t let him kiss me, though.”

“He must be delighted to have you back.”

“Right, we’re having some real fun talks.”

He stood on his aching, throbbing feet. As the silence on the line lengthened, it took on the particular curdled flavor of daytime long-distance rates.

“This is the end, isn’t it, Louis.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Were you back together with her?”

“No.”

“But you wanted to be?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Lauren sadly. “I’m so jealous of her, you can’t believe it. You’d think I was a monster if you knew how jealous. But I swear to God, Louis, I hope she gets better. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

She considered this. “OK,” she said. “I’ll see you. I mean — I won’t see you. I guess. I guess I’m going to let Emmett kiss me now.”

“That’s good.”

“Are you jealous of him?”

“No.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“No.”

“Louis.” There was urgency in the word. “Just say yes. Say yes and I’ll hang up, and it will be the end. Please say yes.”

“I’m not jealous of him, Lauren.”

“Why not? Tell me why not.” She sounded like a crossed child. “Aren’t I pretty? Wouldn’t I do anything in the world for you? Don’t I love you?” Between the moment when a glass is irretrievably knocked from a shelf and the moment when it hits the floor, there is a charged and very finite silence. “I hope she dies!” Lauren said. “I hope she fucking dies right this minute!”

Louis knew that if he’d been in the same room with her, he would have gone away with her and lived with her; he knew it the way he knew his own name. But he was speaking on the telephone, with its little plastic guillotine for chopping heads off conversations. Some providence had steered him back to Boston from Chicago, had steered him in the first place to Chicago, where his father had said: Let me tell you the hard half of the truth about women: They don’t get any prettier when they get older; they don’t get any saner when they get older; and they get older very quickly.

“Look what you made me say,” Lauren said.

“Hang up.”

“All right. I will.”

“I’m hanging up,” he said.

As he removed the receiver from his ear, he heard her say, “I wanted you!”

He sat on the bed and looked at the motionless chairs and the motionless walls until the light in the window became an afternoon light and he decided it was late enough to try to see Renée. He would rather have seen Lauren. He dressed, loosening the laces of his shoes until he could fit his feet in them. He stamped one foot and then the other to settle them into their pain. He made himself chew and swallow two bananas.

At Somerville Hospital a new woman manned the reception desk. She had a long neck and a tiny head. “We have no Seitchek listed,” she said.

“What do you mean no Seitchek listed?”

“This is that poor girl from Harvard? Let me see what I can find here.” She flipped again through her jumbo Rolodex. “No, I’m afraid she’s not.”

“Are you telling me she’s dead?”

“Well. ” The woman requested data on her telephone. She reported to Louis: “She’s at Brigham & Women’s. They just transferred her.”

Brigham & Women’s was back in Eileen’s neck of the woods, over behind Fenway Park in a whole small city of the sick and recovering, where brick and concrete hospital buildings had budded like yeast, putting out wings upon wings at odd angles, nourished by what was obviously an ever-growing stock of unwell people. There was no free parking. Louis went up an elevator, down an endless arterial corridor, through a lobby, down an elevator. He told a nurse at the octagonal ICU desk that he wanted to see Renée Seitchek. The nurse said Renée was in surgery. “Are you a family member, Louis?”

“I’m her boyfriend.”

The nurse dropped her eyes to a stack of folders with red tabs and shuffled them nervously. “I’m afraid it’s immediate family only.”

“What if I said I’m her husband?”

“But you’re not her husband, Louis. Mrs. Seitchek’s in the staff lounge around the corner if you’d like to talk to her.”

The staff lounge was empty except for a petite woman in pleated navy-blue slacks and a pink blouse who was pouring coffee into a styrofoam cup. Her hair was short, permed, and frosted. She wore heavy gold jewelry of simple design on her tanned hands and wrists. A soap was playing on the television next to her.

“Mrs. Seitchek?”

When the woman turned, he saw Renée’s very own expression of mild surprise. He was looking at a Renée who had aged twenty-five years; who had let the sun broil her skin to the color of crust on white bread; who had plucked her eyebrows and put on silvery pink lipstick; who had not slept last night; and who had been born very pretty. His first impulse was to fall in love with her.

“Louis Holland,” he said.

Mrs. Seitchek looked at him uncertainly. “Yes?”

“Renée’s boyfriend.”

“Oh,” she said. He watched her take in his baldness, his white shirt, his black pants. A trace of one of Renée’s own grim smiles bent her lips. “I see.” She turned back to the coffee cart and sweetened her coffee from a pink packet. “Are you from Harvard, Louis?”

“No. Chicago originally. But I wanted to know how she is, and when I can see her.”

“She’s in surgery again, her leg now. A bullet hit the bone.” Mrs. Seitchek’s shoulders drooped, and she rested her hands on the coffee cart. “She’ll be on a ventilator for a while, and very heavily sedated. You can get in touch with me in a week or ten days, when she’s on the floor and we have some idea who she’d like to have visit her. Maybe she’ll want to see you then.”

“Can’t I see her sooner?”

“It’s only immediate family, Louis. I’m sorry.”

“I’m her boyfriend.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d sort of like to see her as soon as possible.”

Mrs. Seitchek shook her head, her back still turned. “Louis, I don’t know if you know anything about our relationship with Renée. I certainly don’t know a thing about you, I didn’t even know your name. So let me explain that Renée does not confide in me. We love her very much, but for whatever reasons, she’s chosen to be distant. I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me?” She turned to him. “How many boyfriends Renée has?”

“Just me,” Louis said. “Except—”

“Except.”

“Well, we had a fight.”

Again he saw a trace of Renée’s bitter smile. “And the young Chinese man. Howard. He’s not her boyfriend?”

“Not really.”

“Not really. I see. And the young man who was here just before you? Terry.”

“Definitely not.”

“Definitely not. All right. That’s not quite the impression he gave, but if you say so. ”

Louis tried to think of someone who knew for sure that he and Renée had lived together, of some hard evidence of a relationship. He thought of saying: Your son Michael sells real estate and your son Danny is an intern in radiology. But he could already hear the obvious reply: If you’re her lover, where were you yesterday afternoon?

Mrs. Seitchek dropped a coffee stirrer in a wastebasket. “You see the problem, don’t you? My daughter was the victim of a crime, and we have no idea who’s responsible. We didn’t have the tiniest inkling of her private life until we came here. And I have to say, things aren’t much clearer now. So under the circumstances I think it’s best if we just wait.”

“But next time you talk to her. maybe you could at least tell her that Louis is — you know. Around?”

“We’ll see.”

“Why is that a problem?”

“I said we’ll see. I don’t want to upset her if—”

“I am her boyfriend, Mrs. Seitchek. I’m going to die of grief if she dies. I’m—”

“So am I, Louis. So is her father, so are her brothers. We all love her, and we all want her to live.”

“Well, so tell her.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Excuse my stupidity, but—”

“Please go now.” Mrs. Seitchek’s eyes had filled. “Please go.”

Louis wanted to put his arms around her. He wanted to kiss her and take her clothes off, to have her be Renée, to bury his face in her. Suddenly close to tears himself, he ran from the room.

Outside, as he passed the octagonal desk, he saw a man he thought he recognized from the family picture Renée had shown him once. The man had bright red skin and thin white hair, combed straight back, and he wore a pair of very scary glasses — thick trifocals with outsized lenses and heavy-duty plastic frames. He was reading the fine print on a bottle of liquid medicine.

“Excuse me, are you Dr. Seitchek?”

The man’s eyes flicked up to the middle band of the trifocals and looked at Louis piercingly. “Yes.”

“I’m a friend of your daughter. I wonder if you could give her a message sometime in the next — days. I wonder if you could tell her Louis loves her.”

Dr. Seitchek returned his eyes to the bottle. He was a former dean of Northwestern’s medical school, and although Renée was as reticent about him as about everyone else in her family, Louis had gotten the idea that he was something of a major figure in American cardiology. His voice was low, limited, professional. “You’ve spoken to my wife?”

“Yes.”

“She explained our uncertainties?”

“Sort of.”

The magnified eyes stabbed Louis with another look. “Renée terminated a pregnancy yesterday. Were you aware of that?”

“Yeah. In fact I was the, uh, other party.”

“Your name is Louis.”

“Louis Holland. Yes.”

“I’ll give her the message.”

“I really appreciate it.” He touched Dr. Seitchek’s shoulder, but his hand might have been a fly alighting there for all the response it got. “Can I ask something else? — Who she thinks might have done it? Did they ask her?”

Dr. Seitchek again raised his eyes from the bottle of medicine. “I don’t think she has any idea.”

“That’s what she said? That she has no idea?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“She could talk?”

“She was conscious and alert this morning. But she doesn’t appear to have any memory of yesterday afternoon. I don’t think she saw anything anyway.”

“But what did she say?”

Dr. Seitchek studied him as if there were fine print on his face. “Is there something you think she should have said?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something you want to tell me?”

“No.”

“Let me give you the detective’s number. I guess you know we’re offering a reward?”

Pleasant Avenue was deserted in the Friday late morning sun. Louis tried not to look at the blood on the stoop, but he couldn’t help seeing it, peripherally, as he went inside. He took Renée’s spare key from behind a patch of loose wallpaper in the stairwell.

Her apartment was very clean and very hot. He opened the kitchen window, letting a fresh northern breeze and the whitish noise of commerce on Highland Avenue trickle into the suffocating, coffee-scented stillness. He went to her bedroom and noted the bareness of her desk, where he’d last seen the pile of articles about induced seismicity and the Peabody earthquakes. There was again that atmosphere of finality, of control, of planned departure, that he’d noticed the first time he came here. It took him a conscious effort to break through the force fields she’d set up and search her desk and bookshelves. He looked inside every folder, every envelope. He searched her closets and her dresser, reaching down through socks and sweaters. Nowhere did he find anything remotely connected with Sweeting-Aldren, New England earthquakes, or injection wells.

He sat down on her bed and wondered if she’d thrown it all away. She’d thrown away her tapes and records, she’d thrown his own tapes and television and clothes into the hall, she’d thrown away a potential baby; maybe she’d thrown away their theory too.

He opened the drawer in her spavined maple nightstand. The last filled square on her calendar was Thursday’s, where she’d written NCHA 3pm, and more faintly, in pencil in one corner, the number 48. There was a penciled 41 in the previous Thursday’s square, a penciled 39 and the words 35 Federal, Salem, 6pm in ink in the Tuesday before that, a penciled 35 and a Washington Street address in the Friday before that, and a penciled H the day before that. Stretching back into May were 27 days whose whiteness was disturbed only by penciled L’s. Then came six boxes in a row with penciled X’s and another L. Then six completely white days leading back to the last Saturday in April, where she had written Party 8:30pm in ink and penciled in a solitary L.

Altogether there were eighteen L’s. He’d never seen her making these notations. He wouldn’t have been able to guess how many times they’d made love; now he didn’t have to.

The Salem address he recognized as Henry Rudman’s, but the Washington Street address meant nothing to him. He wrote it down on the Sheraton Baltimore notepad that she kept by her reading lamp. Then he put the calendar back in the drawer and smoothed the bedsheets where he’d been sitting.

It was nearly four o’clock before Howard Chun, sporting two black eyes and carrying a squash racket, came in to work at Hoffman Lab. Louis was waiting in the corridor by his office. He asked if Renée had mentioned that the Peabody earthquakes might have been induced by Sweeting-Aldren.

Howard unlocked his office and went inside. “Too deep,” he said. “Injection wells are shallow.”

“She found some papers that made it look like they drilled a really deep well in 1970.”

“Cost too much to pump. Take too much pressure.”

“Well, it was a theory she had. She was looking into it last month, and I want to know if she was looking into it last week. Because I think it might have been the company that shot her.”

“You tell the police?”

“I don’t want to unless I know she was looking into it.” Howard unlocked her desk and file cabinets, and Louis, to his unsurprise, found nothing. He crossed the hall to the system rooms, where Howard had logged on from several terminals. “Can I look in her computer accounts?”

“She never say anything,” Howard said.

“I know, but she was working on it.”

Howard logged on from yet another terminal, using Renée’s name and password. “You see her yet?”

“No.”

“She love you.”

“Does she?”

Howard nodded. “Love love love love,” he said, idly, as he employed a utility called XFILES. “These are text files she change or create since last backup, June 4. Far enough back?”

There were only six files — three brief letters to other scientists and three of her papers about Tonga. Louis scrolled through them all. “You’re sure this is everything?”

“Everything that’s here.”

“Is it possible for someone else to get access to her accounts?”

“Too easy, yeah. Got a stupid operator password. Just ‘OP.’ Really stupid.”

“I’m sorry I hit you. I was jealous of you.”

“Love love love,” Howard said.

An evening chill was creeping into the lobby of the building that the Washington Street address had led him to. The directory had a listing for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but the night guard said to come back on Monday, because everyone had gone home.

“I have to see her,” Louis said, on the telephone.

“Maybe on Monday,” said Mrs. Seitchek, from her hotel room.

“I have to see her. When you go there in the morning, ask her if she thinks it might have been somebody from Sweeting-Aldren that. did it.”

“Sweet ’n’ what?”

“Sweeting-Aldren. The chemical company.”

“Louis, I think you should be talking to the police, not me.”

“Tell her I think it might have been Sweeting-Aldren. Will you just tell her that? She’ll know if she wants to let the police know. It’s not my decision.”

“Something’s going on here, and I think I have a right to know what it is.”

“I’m going to give you my number, and I want you to tell her what I said.”

It took him all of Saturday, in the earth sciences library upstairs from the university’s Peabody Museum, to track down and photocopy the handful of papers that Renée had started with six weeks ago. They were all there, however; they were all real. He reread the paper by A. F. Krasner, trying to smell the female mammal who’d composed it, but the prose, the very typeface, was old and withered.

The answering machine on Marlborough Street said: Louis, this is Liz Seitchek. You may meet me at the surgical ICU at ten tomorrow morning.

Channel 4’s Penny Spanghorn said that Renée Seitchek was in serious but stable condition at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. There had been statements of sympathy and outrage from NOW, Planned Parenthood, the mayor of Boston, and the president of Harvard. Police forces throughout the metro area were involved in the hunt for the assailant. The car driven by the assailant had been stolen from the Hertz rental-car lot at Logan Airport Thursday morning. There were no other strong leads.

The first-place Red Sox, meanwhile, were beginning a seven-game home stand at Fenway Park.

Eileen emerged from the master bedroom and looked at Louis mournfully. The king-sized bed behind her was covered with reference books and a supine Peter. Louis set down the orange juice he’d been drinking and put his arms around her. She squeezed him so hard it hurt. Then she gave him a plastic card and told him to go rent two movies.

“Breathe deeply?” the nurse said.

Renée breathed. Her face was drawn and heavily broken out and creased by the pain that existence in general and breathing in particular caused her. Her hair was matted and full of dandruff. She was hooked up to IV tubes but was breathing on her own. Her ears were naked.

“A little deeper?”

The effort was made.

“Let me hear you cough.”

She coughed.

“You can lie back now.” The nurse checked the bag of urine hanging from the bed and left her alone with Louis. Immediately he dropped to his knees and pressed her free hand, the hand without a tube in it, to his eyes. But Renée came straight to the point, in a weak, precise voice. “Mom says you think they did this to me.”

He released her hand and pulled a chair over. “How are you?”

“Everything hurts.” She frowned as if she didn’t welcome the distraction of his question. “Why do you think it was them?”

“Because I couldn’t find any of our papers in your apartment or your office.”

“You were in my apartment.”

“Uh, yeah.”

She continued to frown unhappily. “It’s in a big envelope,” she said. “Manila envelope. In the big drawer in my desk.”

“It’s not. It’s not there.”

She devoted some attention to merely breathing. Thick bundles of unopened envelopes were stacked on the stand beside her pillows. “It was there,” she said. “I know it was there.”

“They knew you were interested?”

“It was so stupid of me. I didn’t even care anymore.”

“Did you tell anyone else?”

“No. But the computer at work. There’s a letter and a paper.”

“I don’t think so. Howard and I checked.”

Now she smiled with pain, all her teeth showing. “Oh boy.”

“You’ll have to tell the police.”

“Oh boy, boy, will I tell them.”

“Did you have a copy of the paper?”

She nodded. “On a little tape. A five-inch tape, in a drawer in the airconditioned room. The gray desk there.”

“Is it labeled?”

“It’s a tape I use. It says ‘Do Not Erase.’ Have Howard print it out for you. You can send it to the press. Larry Axelrod.”

There was a silence. Her shallow breathing barely disturbed the sheet on her. “I really miss you,” Louis said. “I really love you.”

She stared at the ceiling; she still hadn’t looked at him. He touched her hair, and the feel of it and the warmth of her scalp led him irresistibly to lean over her and kiss her mouth. Her lips were puffy and unmoving. They released a strong smell of medicine, an unRenée-like smell both harsh and cloying, akin to formaldehyde: the smell of the possibility, suddenly real, that she simply might never forgive him.

The white Matador lumbered into the Hoffman parking lot at one o’clock and ejected Howard from the driver’s side. His hair was wet and he was obviously irritated. He’d been asleep when Louis called him, a little after noon.

“Her paper’s on a tape,” Louis said. “You have to help me print it out.”

Howard let him into the building with an angry huff. “What tape.”

“It says ‘Do Not Erase..”

Howard went to the system room and picked up a tape from the table with the consoles. “This tape?”

The label said Do Not Erase in Renée’s handwriting. Howard huffed and threaded the tape onto a drive in the gelid inner sanctum and gave instructions from a console. He huffed some more. “Not it,” he said. “This is Terry.”

They searched both rooms for another five-inch tape that said Do Not Erase. Terry Snall came in and asked what they were looking for. “‘Do Not Erase’?” Alarm flickered in his face, very briefly, before he caught himself. “Oh, yeah. I just used it myself.”

“Renée had something on it,” Louis said.

“Well, not anymore,” Terry answered with a little laugh.

“You mean you erased it?”

“And I’m not going to feel guilty.”

“You erased the tape?”

“I’m not going to feel guilty,” Terry said. “It didn’t have a write-protect ring, it didn’t have a name on it, and I know everybody’s feeling sorry for Renée now, and it’s a terrible thing, but the fact is that if she wants to go deleting other people’s files without telling them she can hardly complain about me using an unmarked tape.”

“You erased that tape? And then you go to the hospital and act like you’re her boyfriend?”

“Don’t wait for me to feel guilty,” Terry said. “Because I’m not gonna.”

Eileen and Peter’s big bed had by this point in the weekend assumed the aspect of a houseboat. In addition to Eileen’s banking texts and notebooks, it was stocked with Esquires and GQs for Peter, the remote-control box for their TV, a Walkman and scattered tapes, rumpled garments, Pepperidge Farm cookies, a big diet Coke bottle, and a quart-sized yogurt carton with carrot sticks floating in it. Louis declined Eileen’s invitation to come aboard, preferring to sit by the door, next to Milton Friedman’s cage, as he told his story.

At first, though Eileen listened with open-minded raptness, Peter continued to devote much of his attention to the Wimbledon highlights on the screen in front of him. But soon Eileen grew dull-eyed with confusion and information overload, and it was Peter whose interest quickened. He turned the sound of tennis down and asked Louis questions in a sharp, impatient voice. Then he turned the TV off altogether and stared at the curtained window. The color had drained from his face.

“What is it?” Eileen said.

Peter turned to Louis. “The million gallons. When you guys came over that night and she was asking me about that. You already knew about the well then?”

“Yeah, we did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Um. It was sort of my idea. I guess we didn’t want your dad getting wind of it.”

“My dad?” Peter plunged his hands into his hair. “Oh, that’s great. That’s just really fucking great.”

“It seemed to make sense at the time,” Louis said.

“I can’t believe it. All you had to do was tell me, and none of this would have happened. Remember in January,” Peter said to Eileen, “when Rita called me and I went out there?” He turned to Louis. “I hadn’t seen her in about a year.”

“She had that drinking problem,” Eileen said.

“Anyway, she wanted to see me. She told me she was scared. And so I go out there, and the first thing I see is that two of her front windows are broken. And she shows me this bullet hole in her ceiling.”

Eileen gaped at him. “What?”

Peter nodded, avoiding her eyes now. “Needless to say, she’d had a few too many. She was grabbing the furniture for balance. But the thing she wanted to tell me was that if anything ‘happened’ to her, I was supposed to tell the police it was the company. She gave me this spiel about how she’s not happy with her pension plan, she’s short on money, she’s been trying to talk the company into giving her a better deal. Meaning blackmail. Because it just so happens that she knows what those guys are doing with all their nasty toxic waste. She says, ‘They’re not burning it, Peter. They say they are, but they’re not. It’s a million gallons a year, and they’re not burning it.’ And so I ask her what they are doing with it, but she won’t tell me. She says, ‘If I tell you, and he finds out, he’s going to kill me.’ That is exactly what she said. Exactly. And I say, Who’s this ‘he’? And she tells me it’s my dad. ”

Eileen’s lips formed a silent What?

“My own dad. She’s telling me my own fucking dad shot the hell out of her living-room windows. And I don’t even know whether to believe her. I mean, I’m willing to believe just about anything about the old man. But last I’d heard, she and I were sworn enemies because I wouldn’t work for her anymore. So I said, you know, my dad may be a fascist pig, but he’s not stupid. You can’t tell me it was actually him that fired the gun. But she says, ‘Thérèse saw the car. It was his car.’ And I’m like, well, I don’t really believe this, and so I tell her she’d better call the police. And she says, ‘He’s going to kill me if I go to the police.’ Her exact words. And she says she doesn’t want to die, because old Jack had told her what she was coming back in her next life as. He’d told her she was coming back as a cactus. And she didn’t want to be a cactus and so she didn’t want to die. You know, and she’s crying and she can hardly stand up, and what can I do? I get the hell out of there. You know, file and forget.”

A silence fell on the becalmed bed. Peter was shaking his head, his lips hanging open. Eileen’s face was very dark. “You never told me this,” she said in an ominously small voice. “You said she wanted you to help her with her new book.”

“Yeah, I know. But what am I supposed to do? First of all, I didn’t believe her. And second of all, she said he was going to kill her if she told anybody. You know? I was scared.”

“You told Renée,” Eileen insisted quietly, staring at the bedspread.

“Because Rita was already dead. The whole thing was moot. You know, and I still didn’t even know if I should believe her. She had enemies in Ipswich, because of the pyramid. For all I knew, she’d made the whole thing up about my dad.”

“But she didn’t,” Louis said.

“Right. And instead of her getting shot, it’s Renée. And I tell you, it wasn’t just some nobody that pulled the trigger. It was my own fucking dad.”

“Please stop swearing,” Eileen said.

Peter had swung his legs over the bed’s gunwales and was pulling his Nikes on. “I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but I’m going out there. Out there right this minute.”

“Maybe we should let the police—”

“No way I’m going to miss this,” Peter said. “I’ve been waiting half my life.”

Eileen smiled nervously at Louis. “I guess we’ll go out there.”

“Guess so.”

While Peter groomed in the bathroom, she filled Milton Friedman’s water bottle. The gerbil was climbing the bars of its cage, loins and shoulders shuddering as it thrust its penis-like head into the freedom all around it. “I get so scared,” she said to Louis. “He and his dad just don’t get along.”

“Much to his own credit, apparently.”

“You’ll watch out for him?”

“Of course. He’s your boyfriend.”

She insisted that they ride in Louis’s car, rather than let the angry Peter drive. Louis couldn’t remember when he’d driven Eileen somewhere. Possibly he never had. Peter muttered and cursed in the back seat as they sliced through the light Sunday evening traffic on the Northeast Expressway, but the Hollands were silent. Eileen seemed older after her week’s work in the real world, seemed harder, graver, and physically larger, though if anything she’d lost weight. The hands resting on her lap had little softness anymore. They were hands to grip a mattress during sex, hands to spoon food into a baby’s mouth, hands to sign contracts and run deep credit checks.

Exiting from Route 128 in Lynnfield, they left the daylight behind and entered a suburban twilight of shadowing trees, of still and bluely glowing lawns and fields and air untom by any sound more violent than the swish of passing tires. Nature’s appearance was inexpressibly benign here in the suburbs. She lay down and whispered like the warm surf between black-bottomed sea and parched land: between the scarred and mourning woods, and the city where a new nature had taken nature’s place. Lawns freely gave away their smell of grass and earth, lay comfortably naked beneath a sky that could be trusted. Each house was like a mother, silent, set back from the roads with windows lit, as an object always welcoming and sheltering, but as a subject always betraying consciousness of the truth that children stop being children, that they’ll leave and that an enclosure that welcomes and shelters will ache with their absence, will have ached all along because it’s an object.

Eileen directed Louis to a street with only six houses on it, the largest of them belonging to the Stoorhuyses. Peter led them in through the front door. The Stoorhuys living room was a long, low-ceilinged, formal room whose native face was masked by heavy floral drapes and fifteen or twenty bad oil paintings in ornate gilded frames. The paintings were all of European cities — rain-slicked cobblestones, shuttered hotels and scabrous palaces in the dusky colors of ancient clothing, all the reds maroons, all the yellows umbers, all the whites streaked and crusted like guano; there were no people in this Europe.

Floral patterns held sway in the Stoorhuys kitchen. Little nosegays grew like mildew on the chair cushions and the wallpaper, the quilted food-processor and mixer cozies, the stoneware plates and bowls, the enamel lids for the stove elements, and the crocks of flour and sugar and coffee. One of Peter’s sisters, a slender, diffident, homely blonde in collegiate summer fashions, was making popcorn in the microwave. In the adjacent family room, the elder Stoorhuyses were sitting in the glow and squawk of Murder, She Wrote.

Eileen introduced Louis to the diffident Sarah and then to Peter’s mother, who had risen to greet the visitors. She was a tall, gentle woman with an unabashedly ruined face and too-long hair. Louis shook her hand quickly before he followed Peter into the family room. When Peter switched off the TV and turned to face his father, Louis touched the power switch himself and likewise turned, standing at Peter’s side like a second.

Mr. Stoorhuys was sprawled on a leather sofa. He wore a white Ferdinand Marcos shirt with a huge tab collar. “You want to turn that back on, Pete?”

“Peter, we were watching,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys from the doorway.

“I think Dad’s got something to say to us,” Peter said. “Don’t you, Dad.”

Stoorhuys looked up guardedly, trying to fathom the connection between his son and Louis. “Not that I know of,” he said.

“Nothing about Renée Seitchek?”

“Oh, that poor girl,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys.

“She’s Louis’s girlfriend,” Eileen said. She had sat down in a rocker and was sightlessly turning the pages of a coffee-table book called Colourful St. Kitts.

“She’s your girlfriend?” Mrs. Stoorhuys was stricken. “What a terrible thing!”

“Yeah, it is terrible,” Peter said as Louis tried, without success, to pin Stoorhuys with a stare. “Isn’t it, Dad? Somebody shoots her in the back and then blames it on somebody else. It’s a goddamn shame she didn’t die, isn’t it? Then nobody knows all her papers disappeared.”

The corn popping in the kitchen sounded like muffled gunfire. Stoorhuys had opened an Architectural Digest on the sofa and was stroking his bushy forelock, trying to subdue it. “You’ve lost me, Pete.”

“Her papers,” Peter said. “The papers that show whose fault the earthquakes are. She’s told the police, Dad. They’re going to be heading for Peabody any minute.”

“Peter, what are you talking about?” his mother said.

“It was an accident, right, Dad? You just wanted to scare her. Fire a few shots over her head. But then, what the hell. There she is. Just, just — kill her then, right? Why not just kill her?”

Peter was shaking so much that his elbow bumped Louis’s. Stoorhuys turned a page of his magazine, his jaw rigid as he pretended to read. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yeah? Watch him, Ma. He’s got a phone call he wants to make. Just watch. I guarantee you he’s going to get on the phone. Or he’s going to have to go out for a minute. He’s going to wait till you’re not looking, or he’s going to get up in the night. He’s going to go to Peabody, or he’s going to run for his life.”

Stoorhuys shook his head, as if with deep sadness, and said nothing. But his face was covered with sweat and his hands were trembling.

“David,” Mrs. Stoorhuys said. “What’s he talking about?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just more of the same. He’s good, I’m bad. He’s smart, I’m stupid.”

“You’re damn right,” Peter said. “Or am I the one that’s pumping toxic waste underground? And causing earthquakes?”

“It’s a lie.”

“A lie? His girlfriend’s in the hospital”—Peter nodded at Louis, who continued to stare implacably at Stoorhuys—“and she didn’t think it was a lie. And everything she had that proved it’s true got stolen the day she was shot. You’re saying that’s a lie?” Stoorhuys paged back through his magazine, studying the photographs. “I don’t know anything about this.”

“Watch him, Ma. Watch him make the phone call. He’s got to make that phone call.”

Mrs. Stoorhuys wasn’t listening. She was massaging her collarbone and looking as if the ficus tree at her feet were about to make her cry.

“If somebody’s slandering us,” Stoorhuys said, “I’ll have to let the company know. But that doesn’t—”

“Right, the company, the company. That’s what counts, isn’t it, Dad? Who cares about Ma? She’s just a person. It’s the company—”

“The company that paid for your education!” Stoorhuys jumped from the sofa and advanced on his son. “The company that straightened your teeth! That put food on your plate and clothes on your back for twenty years!”

“Straightened my teeth? My God, you think we’re living in Charlestown? You think you’re making thirty grand a year?”

As quickly as he’d heated up, Stoorhuys cooled off again. He sighed and chose, for some reason, to address Louis. “You see what I get at home?” he said. “You see the thanks I get?”

Louis wore an expression of the utmost seriousness and did not reply. He watched as the older man picked up a seersucker jacket from the back of the sofa, patted the keys in one of its pockets, and inserted his bony arms in its sleeves. “Janet, I have to go to the office for a little while. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for all this.”

Although Mrs. Stoorhuys nodded, it was a long time before she raised her eyes from the ficus tree; and then she looked at her husband as if she hadn’t heard him speak. “David,” she said. “I’ve never made any trouble for you about your work. I’ve never. pressed you. I’ve never asked you questions that I. could have asked you. But you have to tell me now. You didn’t really have anything to do with — that girl’s.? That’s all I want to know. You just have to tell me that.”

The fragility of her poise, the tremor in her voice, made even Louis squirm. Stoorhuys himself balled his fists and looked around the room for some inanimate object to vent his feelings on. His glance fell on Peter. He smiled bitterly. “You see what you’ve done, Pete? You satisfied now? Now that she’s on your side?”

“I’m asking you a question,” Mrs. Stoorhuys said. “I want you to answer it. I’ve never asked you questions, but I think I have a right to ask you about this—”

“Oh, you do, do you?” Stoorhuys said, flashing fury. “Well, maybe you’re a little late. Maybe you’re about twenty years too late.” Again, he turned to Louis. “Twenty years ago I got a raise that almost doubled our income overnight. And when I told her about it, do you know what she asked me?”

“I have a right to ask now,” she said.

“You know what she asked me?” He moved closer to Louis, smiling a little, preparing the punch line. “She asked me if we could get a house where the kids could all have their own rooms. And that was it. That was the extent of her curiosity.”

“Why was it up to me to ask? You could have told me!”

Stoorhuys ignored her, continuing to speak only to Louis. “I would have quit the job if she’d asked me one question about it then. I was ready to quit. One question would have done it. But you see, I didn’t even matter. Even then, I didn’t matter. As long as the kids all had their own—”

“Peter. Have I been a good mother? Have I been a good mother to you?”

“Twenty years,” Stoorhuys said. “Twenty years, and she decides to ask me now. She could have asked me a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. But for twenty years, day after day—! She has no right to ask me questions now. And Peter has no right to blame this all on me. He’s not neutral. You have to understand what it’s like with her. I hear her on the phone with him, I hear her asking him about his work and giving him advice, and telling him what to do. But never a word, never a word about my work. My work that has given her everything she’s got.”

“It was better not to—”

He spun around and shouted in her face. “Never a word!” She put her hands in the air and let them hover an inch from her ears. “Never a word! You made your choice, you chose the children, and now you think you have the right to ask me questions? And blame me? Who do you think has gotten the benefit of those twenty years? You think it’s me? You think I haven’t made a few sacrifices myself? Janet — and Peter, you listen to me too — Janet, I have been a better husband than you will ever know. Than you will ever know.”

Louis could see it now, how if this man had had a gun in his hand and a woman in front of him, he might have killed her. Everyone could see it now. Mrs. Stoorhuys buried her face in her hands. As Peter moved to comfort her, she twisted away and ran from the room.

Peter ran after her. “Ma—”

They heard her stumbling on the stairs and Peter shouting, “Ma!”

Louis and Eileen watched Stoorhuys take his car keys from his pocket.

“So you shot her?” Louis said casually.

Stoorhuys looked up at him, surprised. It was as if he hadn’t really registered Louis’s face until this moment. “I don’t even know you,” he said, leaving the room.

A silence fell. Eileen rocked in her chair and turned a page of Colourful St. Kitts.

“Boy,” Louis said.

“Isn’t it awful?”

“Everybody who’s had anything to do with that company is basically damned, including me.”

“I’ll take care of you. You be my baby.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t know about that.”

Peter returned to the kitchen smoking a cigarette. He poured an inch of scotch into a glass and held the liter-and-a-half bottle up so Eileen and Louis could see it from the family room.

“Yes please,” they said.

They sat and drank and sweated on the deck by the swimming pool, where the exhaust from Peter’s father’s Porsche was hanging in the air. The blower of the Stoorhuyses’ central airconditioning unit took a break, and Eileen removed her shoes and dipped her legs in the pool. “What’s going to happen?” she said.

Louis listened to the crickets and to the pipping of a bat. “Investigation,” he said. “Big stink in the press. Maybe there’ll be some lawsuits. If we’re lucky, we can eventually forget it.”

Peter spoke from the end of the diving board where he was sitting. “He as much as admitted he pulled the trigger. And how do you live with that? Was I supposed to call the cops? Tie him down?”

One by one the lights in the upstairs bedrooms were extinguished. The airconditioner came on again. Went off, came on, and Louis wondered if he might simply die the next time its white noise ceased. Eileen was swimming slow laps, on her back, in her bra and underpants. Peter could have been a corpse stretched out on the diving board. Louis focused his consciousness on the sound of the airconditioner, trying to anticipate the instant of cessation, trying to greet this little death with open eyes. What he heard instead, at length, was false morning. Not just a bird or two awakening, but hundreds of them, and the yelping of a neighbor’s dog.

He stumbled out of his chair, not knowing what to do. “Here one comes,” he said.

Eileen let her legs sink to the floor of the pool, at the shallow end. She shook water from her ear. “What?”

It began so gradually, as such a gentle cradling of himself in immense and invisible hands, that he couldn’t have said where the line was, where no-motion had given way to the welling spreading deepening feeling that enveloped them. For one moment, it really was like coming; it felt like the best thing he could ever feel.

Then something extremely serious happened, comparable in his experience only to the high-speed collision he’d witnessed on Lake Forest Road on one of his radio-parts-buying expeditions in high school, when the monotonous afternoon to-and-fro of suburban traffic jumped the track of the ordinary, and even a quarter mile away he could feel the impact in his bones, the noise of instant death filling the sky like a flash of lightning, the squealings, the screechings, the subsidiary bangs each more major than a fender bender, and ever) person in sight began to run, terrified, in all directions: it was with the same kind of impact, the same awful sense of the world’s derailment, the same strident and thundering protest of rigid materials deforming that the earth now shuddered and erupted and windows exploded and flowerpots flew.

Peter was tossed into the water splayed bizarrely, like a thrown cat. A wind that Louis couldn’t feel whipped the trees. He fell down and two pieces of deck furniture roughed him up, stepping on his fingers with their metal feet, jabbing his ribs with metal elbows. He heard himself shouting Oh, come on, STUPID STUPID and heard Eileen screaming like some shipwreck victim far below him, in the thundering surf at the base of cliffs. The back yard seemed to be sinking into the earth’s adipose layer of humus and glacial till, the encircling treetops lurching towards a meeting as the country’s skin dimpled in upon itself. Birds filled the air, wheeling frantically, spreading chaos. The lights went out and the stars turned blurry. The ground hit Louis like the hard bed of a truck with no brakes on a rutted downhill road. He was scared, but mostly he was mad at the ground, at its meanness. He wanted it to stop, and when it did stop, finally, he got up and kicked it furiously.

Eileen and Peter were standing in the shallow end of the pool, mouths hanging open to facilitate rapid air intake. They stared at him as if they barely recognized him. He kicked the ground again and looked at the dark house and transformed yard and muttered, “What a mess.”

16

Mrs. Stoorhuys was handing out gas masks in the kitchen. She wore duck boots and a raincoat.

The kitchen appeared to have been ransacked by a burglar in search of hidden sterling. Sarah kept a trembling flashlight beam on the carton of emergency equipment while another daughter, a somewhat younger one, ran her beam over the mounds of broken floral-print dishes, the yawning cabinets, and the gleaming barf the refrigerator had spewed — a dirty surf of ketchup and cocktail cherries and applesauce breaking on reefs of pointed glass. Few colors withstood the whiteness of the flashlight.

“Peter, help your sisters with their masks.”

“He’s shutting off the gas,” Sarah reminded her.

“We don’t need any help,” her sister added.

“Uh, are these really necessary?” Louis said.

Mrs. Stoorhuys handed him a mask. “It says, masks are to be used if the earthquake is big enough to throw most objects from kitchen cabinets.” She was reading from a typewritten list of instructions in the carton. “When in doubt, use the masks. — Here’s a flashlight for you too. There’s eight of everything.”

The mask was a shiny black plastic affair whose heavy nose made it flop animately. Peter’s sisters had put theirs on now and looked like evil hockey goalies or Satan’s henchgirls. Goya had drawn heads like these, towards the end.

“Now, which way is the wind blowing?” Mrs. Stoorhuys said.

“There isn’t any wind,” Louis said.

“Oh, huh.” She consulted a chart in her instructions. “Nighttime. summer. calm. Yes, here. Proceed north to Haverhill or beyond.”

Peter came inside with a big crescent wrench, limping as he picked his way through stricken appliances and furniture. He’d twisted his hip. Nobody else was complaining of more than scrapes and bruises. “Peter, here’s your gas mask,” his mother said.

“Gas mask?”

“Gas mask,” Louis confirmed.

“Your father left instructions in the earthquake box.”

Peter looked at Louis, and they nodded significantly.

“Now, somewhere there’s supposed to be a gun. ”

“Ma, did you know there were gas masks in this box?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Didn’t it kind of make you wonder what was going on over there in Peabody? I mean, that we’ve got to have these? Didn’t it make you worry?”

“He said it’s just in case the worst thing happens, which it probably won’t. You know how ultra-safe he likes to be.”

“No way I’m going to wear this thing,” Peter said.

“Think of it as a fashion,” Louis said.

“I can’t seem to find the gun,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys, rooting. Again Peter and Louis looked at each other and nodded. “Where do you suppose it is?”

“Better not to ask, Ma.”

“Bottom of a river is my guess,” Louis said.

Eileen stumbled in through the skewed back door in the jeans and snow boots Peter had found for her to wear. She was breathing heavily. “There’s fires,” she said. “I can smell the smoke.”

“Try one of these,” Louis said. “You won’t smell a thing. — Or kind of a pleasant, plastic smell.”

Her eyes widened. “Yuck! What for?”

“Company orders. Put it on.”

She took it in two fingers and held it up like some contaminated fish or hideous accessory.

“It snaps in back,” Louis said.

“I was wondering about Mom,” she said. “I think we should go up there.”

“No, we’re going to Haverhill,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys, burying her face in black plastic.

“We’ll go through Ipswich,” Peter said.

“Not to be a wet blanket,” Louis said, “but isn’t there like a nuclear power plant in that direction?”

“Oh, Seabrook,” Eileen said, her face falling.

“Let’s get to Ipswich and see what the radio says,” Peter said.

Mrs. Stoorhuys distributed more supplies to her troops — hard hats, jerry cans of water, Saltines, cans of Spam, a transistor radio, a heavy-duty first-aid kit. At the bottom of the carton were a pair of large self-adhesive placards with the words looters beware! and a skull and crossbones. Louis was dispatched to post one of them on the front door.

Despite the glass and fallen paintings and general mayhem, the front of the house retained an air of comfort. It was a matter, perhaps, of the deep-pile carpeting. Europe was in ruins, however, palaces crazily tilted, empty streets dumped rudely onto sofa cushions.

An enormous truck rumbled by. Debris pelted Louis and he heard shouts and screams so clear and automatic they sounded canned. He stumbled under the impact of a good-sized chunk of plaster that landed squarely on his hard hat, but the floor was already regaining its composure, and he thought, well, it was nice of David Stoorhuys to provide him with a hard hat.

In his haste, an hour earlier, Stoorhuys had also left the garage door open. It had fallen on the remaining station wagon, denting the roof but breaking only the rear window. Peter was able to back the car out while everyone else held one side of the heavy door aloft. Communication was impaired by the plastic of their masks.

At first glance, the Stoorhuyses’ street looked like any suburban street in the middle of a warm moonless night, the trees and shrubbery and lawns and pavement all undisturbed and the houses still standing. It took a while for the subtler alterations to register, the slight forward pitch of a house seemingly frozen in a sudden lurch of nausea, the semi-imploded outline of a screen porch that wanted to collapse but couldn’t, the buckled aluminum siding, the glimmer of glass in the mulch and euonymus beneath windows. The triple-door garage silently bleeding a sheet of water down a driveway to the street. The swamp-gas flickerings in rooms where unseen families were using flashlights. It was as if the land were still healthy but the houses had all suddenly died of some internal sickness.

Meanwhile the smell of car exhaust which was the smell of life in America was the reassurance that nothing too serious had happened. Four Stoorhuyses sat patiently in their wagon in their hard hats and expressionless masks while Eileen hugged Louis and said be careful. He hadn’t had to tell her that he was going back to the hospital in Boston; she’d assumed it.

In his car, when they were gone, he turned on the radio. There was dead air on the frequency where WRKO had been, and he spun the dial until he found a signal, a faint one.

…his first three at-bats and had a chance to tie or break the major-league record of four homers in a game, but instead wound up on the disabled list with a strained right knee he suffered making a diving catch in the fifth inning. Was he disappointed? ‘Sure, you know, I would have liked two more shots at the record book, who wouldn’t. But the important thing is the team, we haven’t been playing too good the last couple months. I just want to go out there and contribute every day.’ Over in the National League today the Cubs did it again, 7 to 5 over the Reds in ten innings, Atlanta edged Pittsburgh 3–2, Houston blanked the Cards 8-zip, Dodgers 4 to 2 over the Phillies, Mets 6 Giants 1, and out in San Diego the Pods and Expos are having a wild one, they’re now in the bottom of the eighteenth! inning, all even at thirteen. WGN News time is twenty-five minutes past eleven. Men, are you at the age where you’re afraid to comb your hair because more hair stays in the comb than on your head?”

WGN was Chicago. Chicago, place of stable ground. Louis started the engine and eased the car down the empty street, moving his head constantly to compensate for his limited peripheral vision.

“We’re going to begin continuous live coverage of the earthquake just as soon as we’ve established links with one of our affiliates. The quake was felt throughout the Northeast, with no reports of damage or injury as of yet. The epicenter was apparently near Boston, and much of eastern Massachusetts is currently without electricity or telephone service, but we are in communication with our network affiliate in Boston and will be hearing from them in just a few moments. First a message from Schaumburg Honda. ”

The dial was alive with distant stations, Buffalo, St. Louis, Miami, Lincoln. They emerged like the stars when the city lights go out and the universe can suddenly pull rank. In Quebec the talk was of le tremblement de terre, which everyone there had evidently felt. There was cracked plaster in Hartford, station switchboards lighting up in Manhattan, an unconfirmed report of injuries in Worcester. Boston’s WEEI, broadcasting at less than full strength, said damage was comparatively light in the center city. A fire was raging in South Boston and a reporter on the scene said at least a dozen people had been injured, but Dorchester and Roxbury and other areas farther south still had electricity and phone service. In the suburbs well to the north of Boston, an ominous silence prevailed. A teenaged amateur radio operator in Salem said that several brick buildings had collapsed in her neighborhood, and that water pressure was very low. She could see the light of what appeared to be a major fire to the northwest, in Peabody or Danvers. At the same time, all the houses on her own street were standing and no one appeared to have been seriously hurt. The National Earthquake Information Center had released a preliminary magnitude estimate of 6.0 with an epicenter in eastern Essex County. The pilot of a private jet had spotted a large fire on the western bank of the Danvers River and smaller blazes in downtown Beverly. There was an unconfirmed report from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that an emergency shutdown of the Seabrook nuclear power plant was proceeding normally, which the WEEI anchor said could not be right because Seabrook had been closed since mid-May for safety improvements.

He turned off the radio. The lawns and woods on either side of him were dark, dark. A flashing ambulance appeared in his mirrors and expanded, its tires throwing up a spray of sandy water as it passed him. He had to close his window, and for a moment, in the sudden hush, he couldn’t remember the season or the hour; whether it was maybe early on an autumn evening? An ambulance passing him on a chilly, rain-soaked road? It felt like autumn and there was little in his head to persuade him otherwise. If only the road were less dark, or less straight, or if he could see a little better.

Sweeting-Aldren had manufactured the Warning Orange pigment in the hazard cones blocking the entrance ramps to Route 128 and in the jackets of the patrolmen standing on the overpass, where apparently one of the spans had lost its footing. A Highway Department truck’s butterscotch-colored lights were pulsing in the humid air. “What a mess,” Louis said as he turned down a dark street that paralleled the expressway. His mask was beginning to make his face itch.

He had followed the street for maybe half a mile, past cavities of blackness that he took to be front lawns, when his headlights caught a flash of something wrong in the underbrush to his left — the exposed white flesh of trees with freshly broken limbs, and a car-like shape in an uncar-like position. He slowed and made a U-turn, angling his high-beams to light the scene.

The something was indeed a car. Its tires were pointed at the sky and the passenger compartment was flattened and buried in mud and shrubs and tree litter at the foot of Route 128’s elevated grade. Broken scrub maples and torn earth marked the trajectory the car had taken in its plunge from the expressway. Louis left his engine running and pushed his way through weeds and branches to the wreck. Only the parts of the car lit by his headlights, the creased metal and contorted chassis, made any sense; there was a pregnant, dark confusion at his feet, and in the middle of it, dimly, he saw the figure of a man. The body was intact but had flowed halfway out the open driver-side window, hands first, hands bending as the arms flowed onto them, arms bending as head and torso came to rest on them. The body’s angles were like a dancer’s when the dancer touches his limp curled hands to his face and hugs his elbows to his chest and bends his head to evoke tenderness or mourning or submission. The man had a thick neck and wore a cheap pink dress shirt and had possibly never once been so expressive with his body while he lived, his posture never so eloquent of anything as it was now of death; because it was totally evident that he was dead.

There was no traffic on the highway above. Louis stumbled around to the other side of the car, moaning a little with self-pity, and made sure there’d been no passengers. Now that he couldn’t see the man he didn’t believe so absolutely that he was dead. He returned to him and knelt and touched his neck. The skin was cool. He shoved gently and the head twisted forward. He took his hand away. He could hear voices, male and female, from the lawns across the road, and he ran to say what he had to say, which was that a man was dead.

Peter’s sisters were complaining about their gas masks. They said they felt stupid wearing them. They pointed out that nobody else, none of the cops and bystanders they’d passed in Lynnfield Center and Middleton, was wearing a mask.

“Keep them on,” said Peter, driving. “Your livers will thank you for it.”

Eileen had leaned her tired, laden head against her back-seat window and was letting her eyes open and close on the dark blur of exurb they were passing through. She could have slept if Peter hadn’t kept braking for real or suspected hazards — snapped power lines, flooded low spots in the road, and curves that looked at first like fault scarps. She let her body swing however it wanted to, let her masked face press into the glass as the car bounced and banked. It had always been comforting for her to keep on riding and riding without stopping, and it was especially comforting now to be rocked very long and very gently, to have it be the car and not the ground. She watched the alternating woods and settlements and fields. There was a vapor plume on the southern horizon, rising from a point many miles away. She saw it and then she didn’t for a long time, and then another southern vista opened up and she saw it again, a fist of gray gas punching the black belly of the sky, its billowy knuckles glowing orange. It evolved like a normal cloud in a normal sky, appearing stationary if she stared but changing if she didn’t. At first it was a puffy exclamation point listing to the left, and then more trees blocked her view, and then it had buckled and sagged into a question mark. Her eyes kept falling shut as motion lulled her. She recognized the sounds in the car as words spoken by Peter and his family and the radio announcer, but even the minimal effort of understanding them was beyond her. The plume stayed the same size, growing larger as the road carried her away from it. She didn’t say anything. She was almost asleep now and she was afraid that if the others saw the plume it would stop being just a thing in her head and become real.

A family was clustered around a pickup truck, listening to the radio in the light of a Coleman lantern on the hood. There were two young couples, an older couple, and a baby. The older woman saw Louis coming in his gas mask and gaped at him. He said there was a dead person across the street.

Now everyone was gaping at him. “Is. something wrong?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “I guess there’s some concern about the chemical plant in Peabody.”

He’d known he had to tell them, but he wasn’t sure if it was a mistake. The family began to shout questions at him two and three at a time. He tried to bring the discussion back to the dead man across the street, but before he knew it he was left standing alone in the driveway while people hurried away in all directions, some disappearing into the house, others running off to tell the neighbors.

The radio said: There are reports now of at least eighteen people dead, most of them in Essex County. This figure is certain to rise, and it’s a good guess that there have been scores if not hundreds of injuries in what is clearly the worst natural tragedy ever to strike the Boston area.

“Do you need a ride?” the older woman asked Louis. She and her husband were stowing plastic Star Market bags of food and bottles of water in the bay of the truck.

“No. ” Louis gestured vaguely. “Thanks anyway.”

“Might as well get going, huh?”

“Yeah, although. ” He nodded at the street.

“Forget about him.”

He trudged down the driveway and pushed through the brush and poison ivy and stood quietly by the overturned car, looking down at this faceless victim who had become his. Word of a possible chemical leak was leaking up and down the street. More and more engines were starting, and again the earth was trembling.

Eileen woke up when the car stopped on the gravel drive in front of her mother’s house. She took off her mask and followed Peter as he limped towards the front door. An emergency light in the living room, installed to foil burglars, lit the smithereens of a major trashing — the shuffled furniture, the cratered walls. The sky’s darkness had grown waxy, as if night had grown tired of being night and was reconsidering. Peter knocked on the door. Eileen heard a radio voice outside somewhere and went around the side of the house.

Her mother was sitting in an Adirondack chair halfway down the wide lawn that sloped away from the eastern wing. On the grass beside her were a silver ice bucket and a boom box playing news. She was drinking champagne from a fluted glass.

“Are you OK?” Eileen said.

“Eileen.” Melanie swung her head around loosely. “You’re fine. I knew you would be fine. Everything is fine.”

…raging unchecked at this hour at their facility in Peabody. We have no official word yet, but residents who have not already left the surrounding communities should consider staying indoors with their windows shut tightly and their airconditioners off.

“You’re OK?” Eileen said.

Melanie drained her glass and held it aloft. “I am triumphant.” she said. “Triumphant!”

…structural damage, and the major arteries are jammed. From what I can see here, it appears that fire fighters are making no attempt to enter the installation. There is a. choking. harsh. smoke in the air, and I’m sure the fire chief is concerned for the safety of his men.

“How is she?” Peter said, also maskless.

Eileen rolled her eyes and turned away. “Triumphant.”

“Hi, Mrs. Holland.”

“Hello, Peter.” Melanie emptied the last drops of champagne into her glass and returned the bottle to the bucket upside down. “Tell me how your family is. Are they all fine?”

Eileen heard a loud hiccup as she started back up the hill. She couldn’t remember ever missing Louis, but she missed him now.

“Eileen, honey, there’s more champagne in the refrigerator, you can offer it to Peter’s family. Peter, bring some chairs down. There are snacks there too, Eileen. You’ll see them.”

Mrs. Stoorhuys was still wearing her mask. She stopped by Eileen on the dew-slicked grass. “How is she?”

“Oh, she’s great,” Eileen said.

“Such a lovely woman. Such a lovely house.” Janet tiptoed down the hill and touched Melanie on the shoulder. “Melanie?”

Melanie looked up at her and screamed. The radio was barking about the fire in Peabody. Eileen lay down on the grass and fell asleep.

How long it took to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you were living in the black. How long it took even to get from Lynnfield to the Fens of Boston when the expressways were closed and the power was out. Louis figured that he and his Civic were averaging about the speed of a cantering horse as they nosed south through Wakefield, Stoneham, Melrose. He stopped to consult his map, he stopped at damaged bridges and had to circumvent. He stopped and helped a Cambodian man get his rust-blasted Gremlin out of a ditch and on the road to Peabody, where his wife and children were. He gave the man his gas mask when they parted.

The streets with their curbs and sidewalks and sewer holes were not anchored to the ground. Ten Melrose firemen walked away from an extinguished blaze with the easy gait of people leaving church, their backs to the black timbers that had risen victoriously from the earth. A library building had been incontinent of bricks, and the proximity of strong motion, the radiant and lingering randomness of it all, changed the rubble’s stillness from an elementary quality into a kind of pain, an immanence.

The eighteenth century haunted the unfathomable side streets, so latent in the darkness that Louis almost expected to hear the thud of horse hooves in the mud. He saw how black the nights must have been in a town center two hundred years ago, before there were gaslights and long before the insomnia of the current age had spread insomniac hallucinations in strips along the edges of its towns and made the outdoors indoors: how the buildings themselves must have rested, as sightless and dead-seeming as the people asleep inside them. How scary and pretty those nights must have been. How they must have made some kind of true repose and true solitude a possibility.

But that age was only an echo now, dying if you tried to come too close, and wherever he passed people — they weren’t in the business districts or at the malls but on the residential streets — they were glued to automobiles with lights and radios and engines running, and he could not deny that these little tableaux, repeated innumerable times as he proceeded south, were the only things he saw all night that felt bona fide. The stationary headlights drove beams of reality through the supposed fact of the earthquake and lit up patches of the real foliage and real houses that were indifferently surviving the darkness. And the radio, though he kept his own unit mainly off, was the voice of his own age, the one voice in the night he understood. The broken windows and dangling wires and ambulances and injured faces looming up in the night were meaningless. Meaningless because he could look at them and somehow feel no vengefulness, none at all. Not even by the expressway back in Lynnfield, as he’d stood by the first dead person he’d ever seen, had there been any room in his heart for anger. He couldn’t connect the earthquake-killed thing at his feet to any actions within a scheme of right and wrong, couldn’t bring himself to think: the company is responsible for this and they must pay. And yet how could you believe in responsibility if responsibility had limits? How could an earthquake caused by the cupidity and faithlessness of real individual men nonetheless become purely an act of God, with an act of God’s windy inhuman vacuity? Remembering the dead man’s crumpled arms and cradled head, he wasn’t even able to feel horror. The body now seemed like the purse-snatchings he’d witnessed in Chicago, or like the tattered man he’d once seen lying with his pants down jerking off in the bushes of Hermann Park in Houston, an image as unreal as everything else about this earthquake, as unreal as war reportage or assassination footage on television, except that unreality wasn’t quite the word either for what he’d felt there, standing in poison ivy in the last decade of the twentieth century, surrounded by aftermath and wondering why he lived and what a world that encompassed death was really made of. The word was mystery.

He was traveling a parkway in Everett or Medford (he wasn’t exactly sure which) when lights came on and it became apparent that the city and the inner suburbs were far from fully wrecked. A number of houses had dropped to their knees or lost walls, but even the worst streets looked better than an average ghetto block. Irish youths were milling on the roof of a ball-field dugout, drinking beer. Children were playing in the restored light the way children of the desert play in rainstorms. He let himself relax a little, and immediately felt sick with exhaustion and the abject regret that staying up all night had always caused him.

The sky was pink and yellow when he reached Back Bay. Unreality still adhered to the various fixtures from which destruction had emanated — to the buckled sidewalk, to the wet crack angling across Marlborough Street, to the loose bricks and cast concrete finials and chunks of masonry that lay on the grass or pavement with pointed, disingenuous motionlessness, as if hoping to pass as fragments of a Roman temple or boulders at the bottom of a cliff, things that hadn’t budged in centuries. Eileen and Peter’s building, however, was standing just the way Louis had left it.

At Brigham & Women’s a few stragglers, most of them old, sat unmoving outside the emergency room, trying just to be objects until a doctor could turn them back into people with testimony, stories. Broken bottles and fallen tiles had been swept into tidy heaps, and the nurses were brisk and unpanicked. A familiar one sent Louis to the bed where Renée, he saw, was sleeping.

17

All Monday, all Tuesday, the earthquake held the country hostage. Giant headlines marching in lockstep like fascist troops booted everything else off the face of front pages, and in the afternoon people trying to watch soap operas were subjected to special reports instead. Major-league baseball canceled two nights’ worth of games in case fans had any ideas of taking refuge from the news in balls and strikes. Even the Vice President was forced to cut short his swing through Central American capitals and fly to Boston.

It’s not pleasant to be held hostage; it’s not just a figure of speech. In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it’s just human nature. But war can begin to seem like a well-earned fireworks display, and a serial killer (as long as he’s in a distant city) like a man to root for. A decadent society teaches people to enjoy advertisements of violence against women, any suggestion of the yanking down of women’s bra straps and the seizing of their breasts, the raping of women, the tying up of women’s limbs with rope, the puncturing of women’s bellies, the hearing of their screams. But then some actual woman they know gets abducted and raped and not only fails to enjoy it but becomes angry or injured for a lifetime, and suddenly they are hostages to her experience. They feel sick with constriction, because all those sexy images and hints have long since become bridges to span the emptiness of their days.

And now the disaster which had been promising to make you feel that you lived in a special time, a real time, a time of the kind you read about in history books, a time of suffering and death and heroism, a time that you’d remember as easily as you’d forget all those years in, which you’d done little but futilely pursue sex and romance through your purchases: now a disaster of these historic proportions had come, and now you knew it wasn’t what you’d wanted either. Not this endless endless televised repetition of clichés and earnest furrowings of reportorial brows, not these nightmare faces of anchorpeople in pancake staring at you hour after hour. Not this footage of the same few bloody bodies on stretchers. Not this sickening proliferation of identical newspaper articles running identical interviews with survivors who said it was scary and identical statements from scientists who said it was not well understood. Not these photos of buildings that were damaged but not obliterated. Not this same vision, over and over, of the smoking ruin in Peabody on which an ordinary morning sun shone because the sun still rose because the world wasn’t changed because your life wasn’t changed. You would have preferred the more honest meaninglessness of a World Series, the entertainment of an event towards which months of expectation and weeks of hype could build, bridging a summer and fall’s emptiness and producing, in conclusion, an entirely portable set of numbers which the media couldn’t rub your face in for more than about an hour. Because you could see now that the earthquake was neither history nor entertainment. It was simply an unusually awful mess. And although the earthquake too could be reduced to a score — injuries 1,300, deaths 71, magnitude 6.1—it was the kind of score that your righteous captors felt justified in repeating until you went insane and dissolved in screams which they, however, behind their microphones and computer monitors, didn’t hear.

The picture that made Monday evening’s front pages around the world showed the ruins of Sweeting-Aldren’s facilities in Peabody. Twenty-three of the deaths and 110 of the injuries had been suffered by company employees caught in the initial explosion of two process lines and the ensuing general conflagration. The earthquake had disabled various fire-control systems, and balls of combusting ethylene and sheets of flaming benzene had ignited storage tanks. A blast apparently caused by ammonium nitrate leveled process lines that otherwise might not have burned. White clouds rained nitric acid and hydrochloric acid and organic reagents, the hydrocarbons and halogens combining in an environment as high-temperature and low-pH as the surface of Venus, but considerably more toxic. Cooling and drifting, the vapor plume descended on residential neighborhoods and left a whitish, oily residue on everything it touched.

By Monday afternoon EPA officials in Mylar suits were measuring dioxin levels in the parts-per-hundred-thousand on streets immediately to the north of the installation. Birds littered the ground beneath trees like fallen, mold-cloaked fruit. Cats and squirrels and rabbits lay dead on lawns or convulsing and retching under hedges. The weather was lovely, temperature in the high seventies, humidity low. National Guard units in tear-gas gear worked methodically northward, evacuating recalcitrant homeowners with force when it was necessary, barricading streets with Warning Orange barrels, and encircling the most contaminated area, designated Zone I, with flimsy orange plastic fencing material that had apparently been stockpiled with this very purpose in mind.

By Tuesday evening, Zone I had been completely isolated. It consisted of five and a half square miles of gravel pits, shabby residential streets, trash-glutted wetlands, and some worn-out factories owned by companies that had long been scaling back. Already several Peabody residents who had been at home when the plume descended were in the hospital, complaining of dizziness or extreme fatigue. The houses they’d left behind, now visitable only by National Guard patrols and news teams, had the aspect of junked sofas — the bad legs, the weakened joints, the skins torn here and there to expose an internal chaos of springs and crumbled stuffing. Earthquake damage was similar in the much larger Zone II to the north, but here the contamination was spotty and ill defined enough that the Guard was letting adult residents return during daylight hours to secure their houses and collect personal belongings.

News was being gathered in Peabody round the clock. Camera crews skirmished with the Guard, and reporters addressed their audience in gas masks. Some were so affected by what they’d seen, so unexpectedly overwhelmed by the news, that they dropped their pious earnest poses and spoke like the intelligent human beings you’d always figured they had to be. They asked Guardsmen if any looters had been shot. They asked environmental officials if people living just outside the zones were at risk. They asked everyone what their impressions were. But the big question, not only for the press but for the EPA, the thirty thousand traumatized and outraged residents of Zones I and II, the citizens of Boston, and all Americans as well was: What did the management of Sweeting-Aldren have to say? And it was on Monday afternoon, when the question had become inescapable, that the press discovered that there was literally no one around to answer it. Sweeting-Aldren’s corporate headquarters, situated, as it happened, just west of Zone II, had been gutted by a fire which local fire departments, trying to fight it in the hours after the earthquake, said appeared to be a case of arson. The building’s sprinkler system had been shut down manually, and firemen found traces of an “incendiary liquid” near the remains of the ground-floor records center. The wives of the company’s CEO and of its four senior vice presidents either could not be located or else told reporters that they hadn’t seen their men since late Sunday evening, shortly before the earthquake struck.

At five o’clock on Monday, just in time for a live interview on the local news, Channel 4 tracked down company spokesman Ridgely Holbine at a marina in Marblehead. He was wearing swim trunks and a faded harvard crew T-shirt and was inspecting his sailboat for earthquake damage.

penny spanghorn: What is the company’s response to this terrible tragedy?

holbine: Penny, I can’t give you any official comment at this time.

spanghorn: Can you tell us what caused this terrible tragedy?

holbine: I’ve received no information on that. I can speculate privately that the earthquake was a factor.

spanghorn: Are you in communication with the company’s management?

holbine: No, Penny, I’m not.

spanghorn: Is the company prepared to take responsibility for the terrible contamination in Peabody? Will you take a leading role in the cleanup?

holbine: I can’t give you any official comment.

spanghorn: What is your personal opinion of this terrible tragedy?

holbine: I feel sorry for the workers who were killed and injured. I feel sorry for their families.

spanghorn: Do you feel personally responsible in any way? For this terrible tragedy?

holbine: It’s an act of God. There’s no controlling that. We all regret the loss of life, though.

spanghorn: What about the estimated thirty thousand people who are homeless tonight as a result of this tragedy?

holbine: As I said, I have no authority to speak for the company. But it’s undeniably regrettable.

spanghorn: What do you have to say to those people?

holbine: Well, they shouldn’t eat any food from their houses. They should shower carefully and try to find other places to stay. Drink bottled water. Get plenty of rest. That’s what I’m doing.

Tuesday morning brought the news that Sweeting-Aldren CEO Sandy Aldren had spent all of Monday in New York City liquidating the company’s negotiable securities and transferring every dollar the company had in cash to bank accounts in a foreign country. Then, on Monday night, he’d vanished. At first it was assumed that the foreign accounts in question were Swiss, but records showed that all the cash — about $30 million — had in fact flowed to the First Bank of Basseterre in St. Kitts.

On Tuesday afternoon Aldren’s personal attorney in Boston, Alan Porges, came forward and acknowledged that a “cash reserve” had been set up to cover the “contractually guaranteed severance payments” of the company’s five “ranking officers.” These payments amounted to just over $30 million, and Porges said that to the best of his knowledge all five officers had officially resigned on Monday morning and were therefore entitled to their cash payments effective immediately. He declined to speculate on the men’s whereabouts.

The networks had rebroadcast excerpts from the interview with Porges no more than five or six times before a new bombshell detonated. Seismologist Larry Axelrod summoned reporters to MIT and announced that he had seen evidence suggesting that Sweeting-Aldren was responsible for nearly all the seismic activity of the last three months, including the main shock on Sunday night. He said the evidence had been provided by Renée Seitchek of Harvard, “an excellent scientist” who was still in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds. A woman from the Globe asked if it was possible that Seitchek had been shot not by pro-life extremists but by a Sweeting-Aldren operative, and Axelrod said Yes.

Police in Somerville and Boston confirmed that they had indeed widened the scope of their investigation of Seitchek’s shooting in light of this newfound motive, but added that the earthquake had thrown all investigations of this kind into disarray. They said the total breakdown of Sweeting-Aldren’s management structure and the loss of company records to various fires “could pose a problem.”

Federal and state environmental officials were encountering even bigger obstacles as they attempted to confirm the existence of an injection well at the company’s Peabody facilities. By Wednesday morning the last of the fires there had burned itself out, and what remained was eight hundred acres of scorched and poisoned ruins — an uncharted industrial South Bronx filled with murky, foaming pools, unstable process structures, and pressurized tanks and pipelines suspected to contain not only explosives and flammable gases but some of the most toxic and/or carcinogenic and/or teratogenic substances known to man. The USEPA’s first priority, administrator Susan Carver told ABC News, would be to prevent contamination from spreading into groundwater and nearby estuaries.

“It’s now apparent,” Carver said, “that this company’s immense profitability was achieved through razor-thin safety margins and the systematic deception of the agencies responsible for oversight. I’m afraid there’s a very real risk of this personal and economic tragedy becoming a true environmental catastrophe, and right now I’m more worried about protecting public safety than assigning responsibility in the abstract. For us to locate a single wellhead at the site, assuming the well even exists, is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack that we know is full of rattlesnakes.”

By and large the press and public bought the Axelrod/Seitchek theory wholesale. Seismologists, however, reacted with their usual caution. They wanted to inspect the data. They needed time to model and construe. They said the rich and swarmy seismicity of April and May could plausibly have been induced by Sweeting-Aldren, but the main shock on Sunday night was another matter.

This shock, it was shown, had resulted from the rupture of rock along a deep fault running northeast from Peabody to a point in the neighborhood of April’s Ipswich epicenters. Howard Chun of Harvard deconvolved some short-period digital seismograms and demonstrated, fairly conclusively, that the rupture had spread from the northern end of the fault to the southern — in other words, that the event had “begun” near Ipswich. A Sweeting-Aldren injection well could therefore not have “caused” the earthquake; at most it could have destabilized the fault, or provided a general instability with a path of least resistance. But the entire subject of rupture propagation was not at all well understood.

What was certain was that the Eastern United States had suffered its largest earthquake since Charleston, South Carolina, was crunched in 1886. The contamination of Peabody and the scandal of corporate culpability naturally received the most press in the early going — every big American disaster seems to produce one particularly grim spectacle — but as the situation there stabilized, attention shifted to the serious wounds that the rest of north suburban Boston and the city itself had suffered. Rescue workers digging in the rubble of a children’s home in Salem had exhumed eight small bodies. Heart attacks had killed at least ten Hub men and women; Channel 7 interviewed neighbors of a West Somerville man named John Mullins who had staggered from his house and fallen dead in the street with his arms outstretched “like he’d been shot.” Perchloroethylene pouring out of dry-cleaning establishments had put six people in the hospital. Librarians in every town from Gloucester to Cambridge were wading into hip-deep swamps of unshelved books. Shawmut Bank’s mainframe had crashed and an electrical fire had wiped out hundreds of magnetic tapes containing account information; the bank closed its doors for a week, and its customers, finding that their ATM cards wouldn’t work at other banks either, had to barter and beg and borrow just to get food and bottled water. Many people complained of lingering seasickness. After Sunday night, only three minor aftershocks were felt, but each of them caused hundreds of people to stop whatever they were doing and sob uncontrollably. Everything was a mess — houses, factories, highways, courts. On Friday morning federal relief coordinators estimated that the total cost of the earthquake, including property damage and the interruption of economic activity, but not including the contamination in Zones I and II, would come to between four and five billion dollars. Editorialists called this figure staggering; it was roughly what it had cost Americans to service the national debt over the Memorial Day weekend.

Probably the most notorious casualty of the earthquake was Philip Stites’s Church of Action in Christ. In much the same way as they composed obituaries for the living, local news organizations had prepared for the church’s destruction with pre-written triumphant editorials and pre-allocated news teams. As soon as the seismic waves had rolled over Chelsea, four independent minicam vans raced through the blacked-out, fissured streets and reached the church within a minute of each other. Devastation appeared to be satisfactory, though not extreme. Strong motion had split the tenement down the middle, entirely flattening the ground floor on one side of the clerestory, reducing the clerestory itself to a tangle of reinforcing rods caging chunks of concrete, and turning doors and windows into nasty rhomboids. Smoke was surging furiously, impatiently, from the rear of the building, and Philip Stites looked as if a blood-yoked egg had been cracked open on his head. He ran up the street shouting, “Help us. Put the cameras down. Help us,” because the news crews were in fact the only people there to help, and it would be another twenty minutes before anyone else arrived.

Later in the week, Stites claimed that a true miracle had occurred on that dark, humid night: all of the newspeople, every one of them, had put their cameras and recorders down and followed him into the stricken building. They had kicked open jammed doors, releasing herds of screaming, bloodied women. They had braved falling plaster and clouds of black smoke to drag church members with broken limbs from the path of the fire. They had caught men and women jumping out of windows and had cleared equipment from their vans in order to rush them to the hospital. They had saved, Stites said, at least twenty lives. But it reflected a new and uncharacteristic bitterness on the minister’s part that he chose to call the newspeople’s heroism a miracle. He did not, for example, see a miracle in the fact that no one in his church had perished. He did not say that God had protected His faithful from His earthquake. He took no pleasure whatsoever in God’s mercy, because when the smoke had cleared and the sun had risen, he found that he no longer had a church.

He set up a tent in the tenement courtyard and promised to get other tents for the three hundred members of his congregation, but all but a handful declined his offer. Most of them simply left Boston, went home to Missouri, Kansas, Georgia. The rest quietly defected to a rival anti-abortion group called We Love Life whose trademark “action” was to harass clinics with recordings of newborn babies wailing at a hundred decibels. One of these defectors looked a Channel 4 news camera dead in the eye and said, “I don’t believe anymore that Mr. Stites is guided by divine Providence, not after that night of terror. I thank the Lord I escaped with life and limb. Not everybody did, you know, I have a dear friend in the hospital paralyzed with a broken back. I believe Mr. Stites is a great teacher and moral leader led astray by too much pride and we should never of been in that building.”

Another defector, Mrs. Jack Wittleder, was more succinct: “The Reverend Stites let a sinful woman tempt him. We have all now paid the price.” The Channel 4 reporter said: Woman? What woman?? But Mrs. Wittleder declined to elaborate.

Stites himself spoke to Channel 4. “What I really believe in my heart? I believe that God brought down our building for a purpose. I believe the destruction was a test of faith and we flat-out failed it. I thought — I fervently hoped — we had a church that was stronger than any building, and a faith that no earthquake would ever shake. And I still have that faith in my own heart, but I don’t have a church, and I am deeply humbled and disappointed.”

Stites soon also achieved the distinction of being the first defendant named in a lawsuit arising from the earthquake. The family of the church member whose back was broken accused him of fraud and willful negligence in persuading her to stay in an unsafe building; they sought ten million dollars in real and punitive damages. Stites’s lawyer told the press that his client’s entire worldly possessions consisted of one army-surplus tent, one sleeping bag, a Bible, one suitcase of clothes, a car, and one financially troubled radio station. This didn’t stop four other injured church members from filing suit on July 11.

It became a season of lawsuits. Lawsuits salved the raw nerves of the million survivors and held out hope to the bereft. They eased the transition back to normalcy when the networks and newspapers released their hostages; they provided the grist for follow-up reports. They bottled the terrible dread and emptiness back into people’s unconscious, where they belonged. By the end of July the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had been named in eleven different suits accusing it of such creative torts as failure to establish adequate plans for evacuation in the event of toxic chemical dispersal, lethargy in providing shelter for families from Zones I and II, and calculated deception in its assessments of local seismic risk. The Commonwealth in turn was suing the federal government and the builders of various failed highways and public buildings. It was also, like nearly everyone else in Boston, suing Sweeting-Aldren. As of August 1 total claims against the company exceeded ten billion dollars and were rising daily. To pay these claims, the company had few uncontaminated current assets, a long-term debt of fifty million dollars, and little prospect of ever selling anything again. It was taken for granted that the federal government would ultimately foot the cleanup bill.

Renée Seitchek was released from Brigham & Women’s Hospital on July 27. A ten-second clip on the evening news showed her being wheeled from the hospital towards a dented Honda Civic, but by this point the press had soured on her story, because she refused to be interviewed. The investigation of her shooting was stalled (“probably a lost cause,” detectives conceded privately), but authorities were still hoping to bring Sweeting-Aldren’s management home to face a variety of other criminal charges. The FBI had tracked the five men — Aldren, Tabscott, Stoorhuys, the corporation counsel, and the chief financial officer — to a tiny island south of St. Kitts, where the corporation had long maintained three beach houses for business entertaining and executive vacations. Aldren’s twenty-three-year-old wife, Kim, and Tabscott’s twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, Sondra, had joined the party a few days after the earthquake, the corporation counsel’s family had visited on the Fourth of July, and seafaring paparazzi had managed to photograph a beach picnic that resembled a beer commercial in all the particulars. (The Globe ran one of these pictures on its front page alongside a shot of Mylar-suited men shoveling birds and mammals into an incinerator.) Unfortunately the government of St. Kitts-Nevis showed no intention of delivering the executives up to justice, and the Administration in Washington, perhaps mindful of Aldren and Tabscott’s longtime financial support for the Republican Party, said there was little the United States could do about it.

Big chemical concerns like Dow and Monsanto and Du Pont, on the other hand, seemed almost to relish the opportunity to decry a fellow corporation’s misdeeds. They immediately expanded their production of the textiles, pigments, and pesticides that had been Sweeting-Aldren’s mainstay — products for which demand was only increasing in America — and took the lead in demonizing Sweeting-Aldren’s management. Du Pont called the Peabody tragedy the work of “a bunch of devils.” (Du Pont’s own managers were family men, not devils; they welcomed the EPA’s intelligent regulation.) Monsanto solemnly swore that it had never employed injection wells and never would. Dow took pride in its foresight in locating its headquarters in one of the most geologically stable places in the world. By August, sales and stock prices were up at all three companies.

In the public imagination, “Sweeting-Aldren” joined the ranks of “Saddam Hussein” and “Manuel Noriega” and “the Medellin cartels.” These were the guys with hats as black as the tabloid headlines screaming of their villainy, the men who made the good world bad. The United States bore the responsibility for punishing them, and if they couldn’t be punished, the United States bore the responsibility for cleaning up after them; and if the cleanup proved painfully expensive, it could be argued that the United States bore the responsibility for having allowed them to become villains in the first place. But in no case did the American people themselves feel responsible.

As the weeks went by, visitors from out of town occasionally ventured north from Boston to see the fences around Zone I. They had seen these fences countless times on television, and still it amazed them that Peabody could be reached by car in half an hour — that this land belonged to the earth as surely as the land in their own hometowns, that the weather and light didn’t change as they approached the fences. They took photographs which, when they were developed back in Los Angeles or Kansas City, showed a scene that they again could not believe was real.

Bostonians, meanwhile, had more important things to think about. Low-interest federal loans had reignited the local economy. The window frames of downtown buildings had again been filled with greenish glass. Fenway Park had passed its safety inspections. And the Red Sox were still in first place.

In Harvard Square the season came when the sun lost the angle it needed to reach the narrower streets before noon, and the overnight chill and its smell of impending winter lingered in the pissed-on alleyways and the cast-concrete chess tables by Au Bon Pain. Along the river and in the Yard, the Great Litterer was at work again, discarding worn-out leaves on footpaths. Damaged buildings were reopening, the scaffolds coming down. Impeccably put-together students trailed scents of shampoo and deodorant in the Canadian air. They were young and wealthy sexual beings being educated. They were like the unblemished cars that bunched in their egress from the Square, windows shut now that summer was over, fully functional emission-control systems expelling exhaust that smelled good. It was literally incomprehensible that in Zone I, a mere fifteen miles away, squads of bulldozers were even now destroying bungalows in which lamps and chairs lay exactly where strong motion had thrown them on the twenty-fourth of June.

Louis had come to the Square on errands. Though he was no fan of the Square, he came here often now, did his business efficiently, and went home again feeling unimplicated and anonymous. On this particular morning, however, he was crossing the street outside Wordsworth when a silver Mercedes sedan braked sharply on the cobbled apron of a traffic island and a familiar-looking person leaned out the front passenger window and beckoned to him. It was Alec Bressler.

“Alec. How’s it going?”

Alec ducked in his affirmative way. “No complaints.”

Of the driver of the car, Louis could see only female legs in hose and pumps. Alec was sucking a nicotine lozenge with what appeared to be particular amusement. He had new glasses and wore a very smart-looking blazer. “Yourself?” he said. “You find a good job?”

“No. Not— No.”

Alec frowned. “No job at all?”

“Well, for the last couple of months I’ve been taking care of my girlfriend. You probably heard about her. Her name’s Renée Seitchek?”

Here the driver of the car leaned across Alec’s lap and showed her face to Louis. She was a handsome woman in her early fifties, with a strong nose and wiry gray hair and black eyebrows. “You know Renée Seitchek?”

Louis had heard these exact words a lot in recent weeks. “Yeah, I do.”

The woman took his hand. “I’m Joyce Edelstein. I’m very interested in Renée, from afar. Can you tell me how she is?”

“She’s. OK.”

“Listen, why don’t you come up to my office and have some coffee with us. If you have a minute. I’m right up the street here. You want to come?”

Louis looked uncertainly at Alec, who simply raised his eyebrows and sucked his entertaining lozenge.

“Come on,” Joyce said, popping the lock on the rear door. Louis obeyed her. His vagueness was no longer something he turned on to foil people; it was the way he really was. When he walked, nowadays, he kept his eyes on the ground in front of him. He always felt tired and was frequently short of breath. He wore clothes that had belonged to Peter Stoorhuys, a red sweatshirt and some gray jeans that he put on morning after morning and, objectively speaking, looked bad in. When he saw his own old blacks and whites or even thought about them, he squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could.

The office he was taken to occupied the third floor of a clapboard building on Brattle Street that maybe a hundred years ago had been a private residence. The brass doorplate said The Joyce Edelstein Foundation. A receptionist and an assistant said “Good morning, Mrs. Edelstein.” Joyce left her visitors in a private office decorated in harmony with the large Monet pondscape that hung on one wall. Alec made himself at home on a white leather sofa. His skin was no longer the gray that Louis remembered; even his hair seemed thicker. He’d pretty clearly quit smoking. “Joyce is a phil-an-thropist,” he said, making her sound like some curiosity of nature.

“Uh huh.”

“Renée is kind of a hero of mine,” Joyce said, matter-of-factly, as she returned with a tray of coffee, cream, and sugar. “I’m involved in funding a variety of organizations, and if there’s any kind of unifying theme to my concerns it would probably be reproductive rights and the environment. For me both those things came together this summer with the earthquake and what happened to Renée. I actually wrote her a letter, I don’t know if she got it, I — didn’t particularly expect a reply.”

Louis did not say: A lot of people wrote her letters.

“So how’s she doing?” Joyce said.

“She’s all right. She’s got a bone infection in her leg, it started after she left the hospital. She’s still sort of sick.”

“It’s been how long?”

“Three months.”

“That’s really hard. And you— You’re—?”

“I live with her.”

“In—”

“In Somerville.”

“Forgive me, are you not feeling well? If this is hard for you to talk about. ”

“No. I just gave blood, that’s all.”

“Gave blood? Good grief, why didn’t you say so? Here, sit down. Please.”

Louis sat in the indicated chair and lowered his head over his coffee cup. Joyce looked at him with compassion and concern. She also looked at her watch. Alec was slurping and spectating from his distant sofa.

“Are you. Renée’s only caregiver?” Joyce said.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Louis, that can be so draining. It can tire you in ways you’re not even aware of. Forgive me for asking, but is Renée — fully covered with her insurance? I’m only thinking, if what she really needs is a nurse, maybe it would give you—”

“It’s no big thing,” Louis said. “It’s just shopping and a little cooking and driving.”

“Yes, but psychologically—”

He stood up and crossed the room. “It’s OK. I can handle it. I mean — I can handle it. I appreciate your concern. But it’s no big thing.”

“I’m sure you can handle it,” Joyce said gently. “I only want. ”

“Joyce needs to help people,” Alec commented. “It’s in her nature.”

With a little shudder, Joyce let this description of her pass. “I only want you to know that if you do need help, there are people out here in the world to help you. If I have any one purpose in life, it’s to let people know that they do not have to suffer in solitude. For every person who has a need, there’s a person, somewhere, who wants to take care of that need.”

Louis closed his eyes and thought: Please stop talking.

Joyce looked helplessly at Alec. Anyone could see she was a perceptive person. It obviously really did cause her pain to see Louis suffering, and to know that the streets of Cambridge and Boston were full of people like him — that all you had to do was dip a net in randomly and you’d come up with suffering. And to know that she herself was not suffering.

“Listen,” she said, “I hope you’ll tell Renée that there are a great many people in this city who care about her and are pulling for her and want to help her. If nothing else, I’m here, and if there’s anything she needs. ”

Louis closed his eyes and thought: It is necessary to suffer.

“And Louis, I know I don’t have any business saying this, but if you stop and think about it, you might want to not donate blood for a while, especially if it’s something you’re doing often. You need your strength for one thing at a time.”

It is necessary to suffer. It is necessary to suffer.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Louis said.

Joyce sighed and shook her head. “You’re welcome.”

Alec followed him out of the office, arresting him at the top of the stairs. “One sing. Stop a minute, one sing. I spoke with Libby last week. Libby Quinn. She wants your number.”

“Why does she want my number?”

“If you need a job, you call her.”

“Why the change of heart?”

“Stites is leaving. Some midwestern state he’s going to. You heard this?”

“And you told her to call me.”

“Yes, OK, I told her. But she doesn’t have your number. She needs an engineer. I told her, minimum wage, and he loves radio.”

“Minimum wage. Thanks.”

“You can make a deal. Sink about it, eh?”

“I can’t, now.”

“But you love radio. I knew this about you.”

“I used to.”

“So you call me when you want to work. You must call me. And you must give me your number.”

Louis took the pen Alec offered. “I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to your friend.”

“She’s used to it. You go home now.”

“Tell her I’m sorry.”

“Yes, maybe. It doesn’t matter.”

Alec drew a European crossbar through the stem of the 7 in the number Louis had written down. Then he returned to Joyce’s office without another word.

The only time Louis felt safe from torment now, the only time he liked the person he was, was when he was alone with Renée on Pleasant Avenue. As long as he was in her apartment, he knew what he was doing because everything followed logically from the supposition that he loved her. He was her cook, her comedian, her comforter, her maid. Even three months ago, he wouldn’t have assumed that he could console a sick person weeping over the slowness of her recovery: that the necessary words could come to him as automatically as the motions of sex did. He would probably have sneered at a person who said that love could teach him the many specific skills that constitute patience and grace, and certainly at the person who said that love was a gold ring which if grasped carried you upward with a force comparable in strength to the forces of nature. But this was exactly what he felt now, and the only question was why, when he was by himself or outside of the apartment, his life with Renée still felt like such a sorrow.

In the days and weeks following the earthquake he had gone to the hospital every afternoon, adhering to a tacit agreement whereby he stayed away until three o’clock or so and Mrs. Seitchek stayed away after that. It wasn’t that there was any special hostility between mother and boyfriend — Louis continued to be resolutely polite to Mrs. Seitchek, and she in turn now recognized him as Renée’s official first choice and went so far as to share with him her views on the “incredibly immature” Howard Chun and the “incredibly dangerous” things her daughter had been doing. The problem was simply that on the one occasion when they had visited Renée at the same time, Renée had looked utterly wretched and refused to speak to either of them — at least until her father came into the room. Then she answered everyone’s questions and kindnesses with a humility that Louis had never seen in her before. He wondered if there was anyone in the world who wouldn’t be afraid of Dr. Seitchek and his trifocals.

All day long, no matter how many people visited her, Renée seemed never to forget that at night she was alone. She told Louis that whenever she woke up, at whatever time of day or night, she felt like she was still awakening in the windowless ICU where it was always night. She could open her eyes and see his face and still believe that, only a moment earlier, she had been in that other place.

She let him read her mail while she dozed. There were some twenty-six hundred envelopes in bundles on the table by the head of her bed. Inside them were checks and cash gifts totaling about $19,000, and letters short and long.

Louis was jealous of all the people who had written to her, people who didn’t owe her anything and whose interest was therefore beyond suspicion. He was jealous of the men he had to leave the room for when they came to visit her — Howard Chun, various professors and colleagues, even Terry Snall (though Terry came only once and left Renée livid and seething when he tried to “joke” about all the public attention she was getting). He was especially jealous of Peter Stoorhuys. After the initial flood of visitors and outpouring of sympathy had ebbed, Peter was the only person besides Louis and Mrs. Seitchek who still came to the hospital almost every day. The worst thing about Peter’s visits was that Louis could see that there was no ulterior motive — that Peter simply liked and admired Renée and was sorry she was hurt and regretted that his father was responsible. He was blind to Louis’s jealousy, just couldn’t conceive of it. He brought Renée newspaper and magazine clippings, he brought tapes for her Walkman, he brought his mother. Sometimes he brought Eileen, too, although she continued to be preposterously shy around Renée. Louis paced the halls and rode the elevators and read Glamour and Good Housekeeping with clenched teeth, returned to Room 833 and found Renée and Peter still conversing in low voices. She seldom seemed more relaxed or self-confident than after Peter had visited her.

In Peter’s eyes, Louis had stopped being Eileen’s little brother and become Renée Seitchek’s boyfriend — the partner in her assault on Sweeting-Aldren, and the man who had helped expose David Stoorhuys as the fraud that Peter had long known him to be. Peter gave Louis clothes, including certain items that he still liked, and single-handedly achieved the breakthrough of perceiving that Louis would never be a salesman of ad space or of anything else. Eileen made dinner for the three of them when Louis came home from the hospital. Whenever he looked unhappy, which was often, she asked him what was wrong and tried hard to cheer him up.

What was wrong was that he felt utterly at sea. Now that Eileen was being a peach and Peter no longer patronized him, he had no choice but to be sincere with them. But sincerity implied some kind of belief in something — the kind of belief that Eileen and Peter had in living in America and making a good life for themselves, or that Renée had in the power of women. Louis still thought the country sucked and he had his doubts about the okayness of being male. If he’d ever known how to believe in anything else, he’d long ago forgotten.

He was jealous of the people with pure motives who brought Renée pleasures — pleasures that she shared with him because he was always around her, pleasures that were small and discrete and more easily appreciated than any brought by the man who did things like watching her sleep, or helping her walk up and down the hall, or telling her he was sorry. He was also jealous of the people with impure motives whom she smilingly indulged because amusement hurt less than anger. This latter class did not include journalists (these she simply refused to see) but did include the Hollywood scouts who wanted to buy her story for a prime-time dramatization; the pro-choice activist who wondered if she might address a rally by telephone; and, just before she was released from Brigham & Women’s, her own mother, who one afternoon at three o’clock met Louis at the door of Room 833 and asked him for his help in persuading Renée to return to Newport Beach to complete her recuperation. Renée’s father had already gone back, and her mother pointed out that when she left the hospital she would still need care at home. The problem, Mrs. Seitchek told Louis, was that her daughter only smiled and shook her head at the idea of returning to California. She had $19,000 and insisted she was going to hire a nurse. Which just seemed so cold, so wrong, so—

Louis said, “I can’t help you here, Mrs. Seitchek.”

He left her in the hall and went into Room 833. Renée said, “You know why she wants me back there with her?”

“She wants to take care of you.”

“Yeah, she does,” she admitted. “But what she really hopes is that if I stay there I’ll develop a taste for golf. And kelly-green skirts. And meet one of the young doctors she can’t stop talking about, and marry him.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t know her.”

He waited a moment. “You’re not really going to get a nurse, are you?”

“Watch me.”

“But I can do it myself.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Please let me.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“You have to let me.”

She closed her eyes. “I know I have to let you.”

More than anything else, he was jealous of her infirmity. It was like a baby that was partly his but dwelt inside her body alone. Listening to it and learning its secrets absorbed most of her attention every day. Whenever he thought he understood it — when he thought that it no longer hurt her to laugh, or that she still needed him to reach things from the table for her — she would turn around and correct him. He had guesses; she had certainty. He supposed that maybe she did still love him, but even if she did she had no time for him. Her distance, the feebleness of her feelings towards him, reminded him of the dreams he had where she was cold to him: where love wasn’t there, where there was another man she wasn’t telling him about.

But the baby was his, too. The pain in her body, the pain from her bullet-torn back muscles and pierced diaphragm and splintered rib and femur and the surgical incisions, had a way of spreading into his own body and making it difficult for him to breathe. He remembered when she was mobile and unbreakable, when he could lie on top of her on a hard floor and she could laugh, when they could drink Rolling Rock and listen to the Stones, when they could be mean to each other and it didn’t matter, when he could hate the world and it didn’t matter. What hurt him was his feeling of responsibility. He wished he were still working for WSNE, still driving on Route 2 in the blue vernal morning twilight, still in his car with Renée before he kissed her. He wished he’d let her hand her Sweeting-Aldren files over to Larry Axelrod and the EPA. He wished he could have paid attention to all nine innings of the Red Sox game they’d seen from Henry Rudman’s seats, could remember who had won and how, could have knowledge as clean and permanent and inconsequential as a box score. He didn’t understand how he could have let a small part of his life — his greed? his hurt? his outrage? — make him responsible for the pain and desolation that had descended on himself and her and much of Boston. But he was responsible, and he knew it.

A Town Car with a PROLIFE 7 vanity plate was parked outside the house when he got back to Pleasant Avenue. He went inside and mounted the stairs slowly, still a little light-headed with Red Cross sickness.

Philip Stites was standing in the middle of Renée’s room, beside the chair he’d rolled over from the desk and had obviously been sitting in. Renée sat in her armchair in a thick sweater and sweatpants and the glasses which she needed all the time now. This morning she’d weighed in at 98 pounds, up one pound from the previous Friday but still down seven from her weight in June. The feverish rigidity of her face muted her expressions. All that registered when she looked at Louis was the flash of sunlight on her lenses. He hurried into the other big room, the room he slept in, and set the books he’d bought on the floor.

“Louis,” Renée said.

He returned to the hallway. “Yo.”

“Philip was just leaving.”

“Oh. So long.”

Stites, wearing an inscrutable smile, waved his hand. Renée was looking at Louis intently. “I didn’t realize the two of you had met,” she said.

“It must have slipped my mind.”

“Those were unhappy circumstances,” Stites said. “These are much happier ones.”

Renée kept her disapproving eyes on Louis even as Stites took her hand and wished her well. Louis opened the door for the minister. “So, Philip,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I’m sure it meant a lot to her.”

Stites started down the stairs, motioned casually to Louis to follow, as if he had no doubt that Louis would, and stopped on the doggy second-floor landing. Louis glanced at Renée, whose expression hadn’t changed, and descended the stairs.

“Why do I get this impression of hostility?” Stites asked a beam of bright dust specks.

“I hear you’re leaving town,” Louis said.

“Tomorrow morning. Ever been to Omaha, Nebraska? About the only thing it’s got in common with Boston is a big sky.”

“You feel you’ve done sufficient damage here.”

Stites failed to react to this stimulus. He unwrapped a stick of sugarless gum and daintily pushed it into his mouth. “Hostility, hostility,” he said. “I came to apologize to Renée for any pain I ever caused her. And I tell you what, Louis, it made me pretty happy to hear what you been doing for her.”

“I’m glad I made you happy, Philip.”

“Fine, say what you gotta say. You’ll never see me again. But you know damn well that what you’re doin’ is a very good thing.”

“Right,” Louis said. “I’m a hell of a guy. See my Band-Aid? I’ve been giving blood. My penance, right? Because I sinned, right?” He stared at Stites, quivering. “I laughed at Jesus and I wasn’t faithful to my girlfriend and I let her kill our baby, but now I’ve got it all straight in my mind. I’m taking care of her and trying to live a Christian life. We’ll get married and have children and we’ll all be singing hymns on TV. Except I’m such a good Christian that if anybody tries to say I’m doing the right thing I deny it because if I didn’t, that would be pride, and pride’s a sin, right? And faith is a thing inside you. So I’m not only a hell of guy, I’m deep and true, right?”

Stites chewed his gum with smooth, slow jawstrokes. “Nothing you say makes me stop loving God.”

“Well, go ahead. Go ahead.”

“I hope you find some happiness.”

“Yeah, you too. Have fun in Omaha.”

Stites looked at Louis with the complicity and pleasure of a person being told a joke. He laughed, exposing his little wad of gum. It wasn’t a forced or cruel laugh but the laugh of someone who had expected to be delighted, and was. He gave Louis a last, knowing look and trotted down the stairs. Through the landing’s filthy window, Louis watched him evade the grasping honeysuckle and get into his car. He felt a large but strangely painless emptiness inside him, as when he’d been bluffed in a poker game.

Upstairs again, he assumed a casual manner. “Can I make you some lunch?”

Renée sat in her armchair and looked at him. The chair occupied a shadow between patches of sunshine on the floorboards. Her silence was ominous in the extreme.

“Can I make you some lunch?” he said again.

“You certainly got me back pretty easily, didn’t you?”

He weighed the consequences of ignoring that she’d said this. He leaned on the doorframe. “What do you mean?”

“I mean one day I’m living by myself and hating you for how much you hurt me, and the next thing I know I wake up and you’re living with me again and we’re acting like nothing ever happened.”

“You woke up a long time ago.”

“No, I didn’t wake up a long time ago. You listen to what I’m saying. I’m saying I just woke up.”

“Fine. You just woke up.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“About.?”

“About the fact that you’re living with me and we’re acting like nothing ever happened.”

“Well, I was about to make you some lunch.”

“I’m saying you got me back pretty easily.”

“What was I supposed to do? Keep away from you? While you were in the hospital? I mean, how many times did I tell you I was sorry? And you said to stop saying it—”

“Well I felt like shit.”

“But so all I can do is show you how sorry I am and how much I love you.”

She flinched as though the word love were a dart. “I’m saying I never had a chance to think about what I wanted. Everything just happened. And I’m not at all sure about it.”

“You’re not sure you want me living here.”

“That’s part of it.”

“You’re not sure you even want to see me.”

“That’s the other part of it. I mean, I do want to see you. But everything’s all tied together, there’s no room to think. I want to get to know you, somehow. I don’t want us to be together just because we happen to be together. I want to start over again.”

“Beginning with me moving out.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You want me to leave. You’re trying to say it in a nice way.” She closed her eyes and bit her lip. She wasn’t someone he knew, this underweight woman with the hectic face and overgrown hair and wire-frame glasses. A deft exchange had been effected, and no fraud was involved — the woman was clearly who she seemed to be. She just wasn’t the ghost made of memories and expectations that he had seen at breakfast. She opened her eyes and looked straight ahead. “Yes, I want you to leave.”

He took an unopened envelope from the table in the hallway and carried it into her room. “Is this the problem?”

She didn’t even glance at it. “Give me some credit.”

“Answer the question.”

“Yeah, all right. It’s part of the problem. It upsets me that you got a letter from her here. It upsets me that I found out about it because you were out and somebody else brought the mail up. Because for all I know, you get letters like this every day—”

“I do not.”

“And I just don’t know about it. That’s part of the problem. But it’s not—”

“You think she sends me letters and I don’t tell you. You think I’ve got a whole second relationship—”

“Shut up. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s totally inappropriate for her to send you letters here, and it’s up to you to make that clear to her, because she obviously doesn’t see anything wrong with it herself.”

The personal pronouns—she, her—were pronounced with a hatred like nothing he had heard from her before. Lauren didn’t hate Renée like this.

“I’ll let her know,” he said.

She shook her head. “I can’t live with you.”

“I told you I don’t even think about her anymore. I told you all I want’s a chance to make it up to you. I know I acted like a prick. But I didn’t even sleep with her and I never think about her now.”

“And boy was that stupid of you. Because it doesn’t make the slightest difference to me whether you slept with her. It makes zero difference.”

“Well I would have done it, but she didn’t want to.”

Renée looked at the ceiling in disgust and disbelief. “That’s sick. That is so sick. She walks into your apartment but she won’t sleep with you. Because what, I can just imagine it. Because she’s a better person than I am, because she really loves you and she won’t fuck you before she marries you. That really makes me feel good, to hear that.”

“I felt sorry for her,” Louis said, very quietly. He set the letter from Lauren on the desk.

“Well, here’s somebody else to feel sorry for. I do the best I can with self-pity but I can’t do it all. Here’s a person who has a fever every day and whose back still hurts and whose chest is all scars and who can’t see right anymore and has to live and be ugly and know she’s ugly every minute of the day, if you need somebody to feel sorry for.”

He frowned. “I’ve never felt sorry for you. I hurt with you, but I admire you and love you. And you’re so beautiful.”

She made no attempt to hold her tears back. “I can’t live with you. I can’t live with you, and I can’t get rid of you.”

“It’s easy to get rid of me.”

“Well, then, just do it. Just go. Because this is the real me you’re looking at. This is what I’m like inside. I’m a jealous insecure little ugly shrew. And that’s what I’m going to be, and you can go on living with me because you feel guilty and you can watch me make your life a hell, or you can get out and go live with her right now because I certainly have no desire to live with you if we’re going to fight like this, or else you can be kind to me—”

“Kind to you?”

“Kinder than you’ve already been. Kind to me right this minute. You can tell me you don’t think about her all the time. You can tell me I may not be as young as she is, and I may be a scarred-up ugly mess, but I’m still not so bad. You have to tell me that all the time. You have to tell me you don’t write letters to her and you don’t call her and you appreciate me. You have to take all the things you’ve said and say them about a hundred times more often. Because I’m trying to have energy, I’m trying to get back to being a person again, but I can’t do it fast enough.”

For a moment Louis watched her shiver and weep in her armchair. Then he bent over and put his hands in her armpits and raised her to her feet. She was very light. The lenses of her glasses each had a single tear streak down the middle. He kissed her unresponding lips with none of the discretion and conscious kindness of their bedtime and hello and goodbye kisses. He kissed her because he was starving for her.

“Don’t.”

“Why not.”

“You’re just doing it because you — ow. Ow!”

He was squeezing her hard, one of his hands directly on the closed entrance wound in her back, his other hand on her butt beneath her sweatpants and underpants, his thigh squarely in her groin. She took his ear in her mouth and said, “Don’t squeeze.”

She shook while he undressed her on the bed. She covered herself with a blanket while he stood up to take his own clothes off.

“Don’t ever put that sweatshirt on again,” she said.

He knelt beside her and peeled back the blanket. He put his cheek on her white belly and the heel of his hand in the hollow of her pelvis. He wanted to fill this hollow with semen. The fast-dwindling warmth of it would tickle her, make her belly convulse like a hillside in the throes of a disaster. He knew this because he’d seen it happen, back in May.

She sat up and tried to pull him onto her.

“I have to look at you,” he said.

“Just hurry along, if you don’t mind.”

Her cunt seemed to him a thing of unbearable beauty. Its readiness, its subtlety, its bed of dark hair. Unconcealed by adipose tissue, the individual muscles in her arms and legs were visible in their small, filet-like glory. Her retroperitoneal scar was a great circle of healed injury stretching from a point below her sternum, around under her ribs, and into the center of her back. For better or worse, his prick shuddered fully into hardness as he turned her body and followed the scar’s irregular progress, its purple and red runes, through the places where it was a bunching of the skin and the more tender-looking places where it was a stretching. He couldn’t help thinking of the aerial photograph of the San Andreas Fault he’d seen in one of her books, how the long raised seam traversed the smooth skin of the California desert, how the narrow groove down the center of the seam was cut by suture-like hatchings. He felt glad to be alive and in this bed. There had ceased to be any question in his mind that the thing he was looking at was Renée Seitchek. The focus of his love had migrated from his imagination into her body, and had taken his imagination along with it, the inescapable joining of her legs now embodying some necessary convergence of emotions in himself, the warmth of her skin identical to the warmth his eyes felt when the lids came down to cover them. He licked her cool thoracostomy scar. He kissed the ragged star of the exit wound beneath her right breast. A bullet had come through here bearing bits of her bone and her lung tissue, but she was breathing without pain now. She played with his prick, opening and closing her opposed finger and thumb, pulling strands in the clear taffy it secreted. She bent sideways and sucked on it, briefly.

He squeezed a blob of nonoxynol jelly into the center of her diaphragm, lubricated the rim and folded it in two, and pushed it into her vagina until it unfolded into place. The procedure was similar in some interesting ways to preparing a bird for roasting.

She looked scared when he settled himself on top of her. He resisted the idea that it was “important” that they were making love now, but unfortunately it did seem kind of important. Her eyes were open wide and she was blinking rapidly, as if it might have been Death and not Louis who was weighing on her chest and sliding a firm piece of his flesh into a narrow gap in hers, and more generally invading the citadel where she had kept her self, her soul, during the months when she was lonelier than she was now. He slung his left leg up over her hip to keep from bearing on her osteomyelitic femur. The position was awkward, and she lay so inertly, through little choice of her own, that he felt like he was clinging to a slippery rock with not many handholds.

“Tell me when I’m hurting you.”

“Well I’m hurting a little in a lot of places.”

“Hurting you too much I mean.”

Eyes closed, she pressed him into her as deeply as he would go. She breathed in the heavy, heedless way that made a man feel like a king and made his ejaculation an event of huge sweetness. He lay beside her and massaged the forward end of her labia with the palm of his hand until she came. He took his prick in his own hand and deposited semen in the pelvic hollow he had a fetish for. She thrashed a little, and rubbed the hollow for a long time before it stopped tickling her. They made inane and sentimental statements about breath and current genital conditions and love. They repeated the major act, straining and sweating until she became fretful and told him she was feeling really sick. He stood up immediately and covered her with the blanket. “Let me get you some lunch.”

She shook her head. She was slack-faced and miserable. “Some toast, some tea.”

“There’s no way I can go out tonight. You’ll have to call her.”

“You can sleep all afternoon. We’ll see how you feel.”

“I’m so tired of being tired.”

“Have a bite. Take a nap.”

When her door was closed and he knew that she was sleeping, he sat at the kitchen table and opened the envelope from Lauren. There was a letter in her pretty, ungainly hand.

He left the letter on the table so Renée could read it if she wanted. He felt vaguely tainted or compromised, and he wondered if he’d had the wrong idea about Lauren all along. At the moment, at least, she didn’t compare well with the woman he’d just mated with.

His lunch eaten, he faced the problem of the afternoon. In the morning he shopped, worked on his car, did cleaning, and, until a few days ago, took Renée to the clinic for her daily antibiotics shot; in the evening they ate and went to movies or watched TV. But in the afternoon he ran up against the same hopelessness that had afflicted him ever since he lost his job at WSNE. All he could find to do while Renée rested was read books. He’d consumed the novels of Thomas Hardy one after another, not really enjoying them but not stopping until even Jude the Obscure was under his belt. He’d since moved on to Henry James, for whom his mood of patience and suspended judgment made him an ideal reader. He especially liked The Bostonians, because James’s Boston of the 1870s turned out to be inhabited by the same eternal feminists with whom Louis had marched in the big pro-choice rally in July, the same crackpots and dreamers who had funded Rita Kernaghan and come to her memorial, the same slippery journalists who were still trying to insinuate themselves into Renée’s apartment by telephone. He began to forgive the chill of this northern city. He thought about the Brahmin blood running in his own veins. He watched himself being consoled by literature and history, and, observing how much he’d changed in one year, he wondered what kind of person he was ultimately meant to be. But there was still that hopelessness or sorrow right beneath the skin of his afternoons.

He woke Renée at five-thirty. Her temperature was low enough for her to consider going out, and by six they were on their way to Ipswich. The golds of the season and the hour were in the trees reflected in the contoured glass of cars on I-93. Through the few windows that weren’t smoked for privacy, lone commuters could be seen hunching aggressively over steering wheels or talking about their lives on telephones.

“She wants to kiss me on the cheek,” Renée said.

“Oh, you read that, did you.”

“This is some southern species I don’t understand.”

“She’s a nice person. Very mixed up.”

“You pursue this topic at your own risk. You must know I’d be happier if you told me she’s a total jerk. Her and her little breadbasket.”

“What can I say? I’m embarrassed.”

It was night when they reached Ipswich. The frame of the pyramid still squatted on the house on Argilla Road, silhouetted against the moon-whitened sky, but most of the aluminum siding had been removed. It lay twisted in piles by the circular drive. Extension ladders weighted down a pair of tarpaulins covering tools and stacks of lumber near the front door.

The lean, sophisticated woman of Brahmin stock who was Louis’s mother ushered him and Renée into the living room and poured them drinks at the bar. Again buckets of money had been spent to repair the house, to demonstrate that wealth was stronger than any earthquake. Melanie’s navy-blue dress had navy-blue buttons and padded shoulders and hugged her hips and thighs and knees. She’d visited Renée in the hospital, once, and hadn’t seen her since then. She didn’t fuss over her now. It was left to Louis to make her comfortable on the sofa.

“Before our brains get too clouded,” Melanie said, “we have some business to discuss.” She took an envelope from the mantelpiece. “This is for you, Renée. I think you’ll agree that everything’s correct here?”

Renée silently showed Louis the contents of the envelope. There was a personal check, made out to her, for the sum of six hundred thousand and xx/100ths dollars, and a receipt for the same amount made out to Melanie Holland.

“You’ll notice I’ve dated it the thirtieth,” Melanie said. “You’ll recall this was the deadline we established. Louis, you’ve witnessed that she has the check in her possession?”

“Yeah, Mom.”

“If you’ll just sign the receipt then, Renée.” Melanie held out a pen which Renée looked at blankly. “Or is something not correct?”

Silently Renée took the pen and signed the receipt. Melanie folded it in half, tucked it in the breast pocket of her dress, and delivered herself of a huge sigh. “Well. That’s taken care of. Now we can relax a little. How are you, Renée?”

Renée raised her chin. She held the check in her lap like a handkerchief she’d been using. “Not too bad,” she said.

“That’s marvelous. You’re looking so much more like yourself than the last time I saw you. I hope Louis is taking good care of you?”

Renée turned and looked at him as if she’d forgotten him until this mention of his name. She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

“Louis, that reminds me of the other business I wanted to discuss. This is our last piece of business for tonight, I promise.” Melanie gave a false little laugh. “I suppose you know I haven’t been able to sell this house. I realize it’s not simply my own personal misfortune that there isn’t a buyer to be found between here and New Jersey for a house at last year’s prices. I’m willing to accept the depression of the market in the Northeast and whatever loss that entails for me. Unfortunately, we had another little tremor up here last Tuesday. You can hardly blame me for being surprised. I know I wasn’t alone in thinking we’d seen the end of all that. But no, there was another tremor. Fine. Perhaps there’ll be more. Fine. But in the meantime—”

“Glad to see you’ve calmed down about this, Mom.”

“In the meantime, Louis, I wondered if you and — Renée, too, of course, if she likes — would have any interest in staying in this house. It would be rent-free and very comfortable. If you’re here, Renée, and you still want to work at Harvard, I realize it might be a longish commute. But the advantages, I think, are obvious. I can pay you a caretaker’s fee as well, especially if you’d be willing to show the house to prospective buyers. You see, I can’t help thinking it might lift your spirits to get out of Somerville. And of course the extra income and the savings on rent, Louis, as long as you’re out of work and not sure where you’re going. ”

Louis looked around the room. In spite of himself, he’d expected to feel the presence of ghosts — a spirit named Rita, a spirit named Jack; the spirits of Anna Krasner and his father. They’d all haunted this living room when he was far away from it, especially when he was in Evanston. But now when he looked at the blandly replastered walls and stolid furniture, he knew he could wait as long as he wanted, and he’d still see only the empty present.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Melanie said.

“What?” He looked at her as if she were a ghost. “Um, I don’t think so. But thanks.”

“Well, think it over.” She excused herself and went to the kitchen.

A silence fell in the unhaunted room.

“I’m surprised,” Louis said. “I thought she’d be different.”

Renée tugged on the ends of her check, making the paper snap. “I didn’t.” There was a pack of matches from the Four Seasons Hotel in the ashtray on the end table. She lit one and held it before her eyes until the flame licked her fingers. She blew it out and lit another one. She held it over the ashtray and pushed a corner of her check into the flame just as Melanie returned from the kitchen. When she saw what Renée was doing she began to lunge, instinctively, to stop her. But in the blink of an eye she’d caught herself. She crossed her arms and watched with impersonal amusement as the check took fire and dwindled to a warped black cinder.

“Well,” she said, eyebrows raised. “I guess that’s quite a statement.”

“Let’s forget it.”

“Yeah, what’s for dinner?” Louis said.

On the last day of the regular season the Red Sox clinched the division title and Renée’s orthopedist pronounced her well enough to do whatever she felt like doing. She had been scheduled to begin work in New York on October 1 as a research fellow at Columbia, and Louis had urged her to go, provided she consider taking him along, but she had still been so incapacitated in mid-August, when the final decision had to be made, that she instead asked Harvard if she could stay on for another year. Harvard had been hoping all along to retain her and came through with an offer of an open-ended position as a post-doc. It wasn’t as if Renée’s feelings about Boston had changed. But somehow getting shot in the place and weathering its earthquakes and spending a month in one of its hospitals had given her a feeling of obligation towards it, a sense of belonging that she had lacked in her six years of normal life here. She didn’t want to leave Boston on crutches. She also recognized that she was fully capable of hating any other place she went to just as much.

So they were both still in Somerville when the Red Sox were destroyed in the American League playoffs. After the first game, Renée couldn’t bear to watch the carnage, but Louis didn’t lose hope until the final inning.

Real life commenced for everyone in Boston on the morning after. Renée began to spend long hours at the lab again, and Louis, bored and broke, took a job at a Harvard Square copy shop. Every night he left work with his eyeballs parched by the heat of xerography. He dreamed about making change. He appreciated Renée’s silence on the topic of what he was doing with his life. He was happy to be living with her, happy to be watching her regain her strength and seeing her enjoy the Algerian and Kenyan and American music he played her, happy to be learning more about her work and going out with her and Peter and Eileen and Beryl Slidowsky and the various damaged spirits he worked with at the copy place. He was so happy, in fact, that the less he liked his job, the more necessary it seemed for him to keep it. It was his way of clinging to the lump of sorrow he had inside him, now that he’d lost his conviction of his own rightness. For the moment, this sorrow was the only thing he had that indicated there might be more to the world than the piggishness and stupidity and injustice which every day were extending their hegemony. As much as he loved Renée, he knew that she was mortal; that he couldn’t build a life on her alone, could not even be counted on to keep being good to her without some other anchor. He didn’t know what form this anchor would take when he was older than the twenty-four he’d now turned; he didn’t know if other people needed anchors; he suspected that Renée, in accepting her womanhood, had already found hers. He only knew that, for himself, it was necessary to go to work and serve even the arrogant professors and anal-compulsive artists and psychotic pamphleteers efficiently and temperately, to look them in the eye and thank them for their patronage, to write the date and the customer’s name on receipts for forty-five cents, and to love the world in its materiality every one of the thousand times a day he pushed the Start button on the Xerox 1075. He saw that as a material thing himself he was akin to rocks. The waves in the ocean, the rain that eroded mountains, and the sand that would form the next epoch’s rocks would all survive him, and in loving this nature he was doing no more than loving his own fundamental species, expressing a patriotic preference for existence over nonexistence. He felt that, if nothing else, he could always anchor himself on the rocks in the world. But this was a dim consolation. He hoped there would be some greater thing that his sorrow could lead him to. And so when he noticed that instead of alienating his co-workers he had become the friend and confidant of almost all of them, and that Renée was turning into a person who sometimes cried for happiness, he quickly looked inside himself and found his core of sorrow and clung to it tightly.

Eileen and Peter were married four days after Christmas. Shortly beforehand, Louis learned that his parents no longer lived together. This circumstance had come to light one night when Eileen called Melanie at eleven-thirty and spoke instead to a stranger, a man. Melanie had rented out her house on Argilla Road and taken an apartment in Back Bay, a not-inexpensive one with a view of the Public Gardens. She crisply explained to Eileen that the man was a high-school friend of hers, and did not elaborate. Subsequent prying on Eileen’s part yielded the man’s name (Albert Anderson), his line of work (radiation oncology), and his marital status (widower).

Melanie had raised no objection when Eileen and Peter decided to have Christmas in their apartment on Marlborough Street. Bob flew in from Evanston and stayed in their extra room, and Melanie and Louis and Renée came over on Christmas morning, Melanie with thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing gifts for everyone. She and Bob evidently had some kind of understanding that allowed them to be polite to each other in public.

Whatever the understanding was, it broke down at the wedding three days later. Louis was with Eileen in the church parlor when she caught sight of Melanie. “She promised me,” Eileen said, blood draining from her face. “She promised me she wouldn’t wear that.”

The offending outfit consisted of a backless green velvet cocktail dress of a cut such as makes men’s jaws drop, a pair of green lizard-skin pumps, and a necklace of platinum and emeralds designed for wear in bank vaults only. Melanie smiled prettily at Eileen and gave a little shrug. Eileen erupted in tears while two of her bridesmaids held Kleenexes beneath her eyes to save her makeup. The entire wedding party heard the fight her parents had in the cloakroom, or at least heard the female side:

“I will not! I will not!”

“And who do you think’s paying for this wedding?”

“To tell you the truth, Bob, I don’t give a damn what you think.”

Louis’s timeworn advice to Eileen was “Fuck her. It’s your wedding.” Eileen seemed to understand this; at any rate she stopped crying long enough to exchange vows with Peter. Her best college friend and Peter’s four sisters wore lime-green taffeta bridesmaid’s dresses, while Louis himself, tuxedoed and mildly bewildered, served efficiently and temperately as Peter’s best man. Renée sat with the distaff and continued to be a great hit with Bob Holland. She and Louis had taken dancing lessons in preparation for the reception, which was held in a ballroom at the Copley Plaza. Melanie charmed all corners, outshone the younger women and outdanced everybody, and not many people even noticed the bride’s father sitting at the rear of the room in one of his fifties suits, smashing himself on scotch and imparting philosophy to Louis and Renée. He told them that he’d called Anna Krasner again and told her she was now the only person in the world who could confirm that Sweeting-Aldren had drilled a deep injection well. He’d told her that all the company’s records and all of Renée’s hard evidence had been destroyed. He’d told her that June’s earthquake had left seventy-one people dead. She’d said, “I told you not to call me anymore.”

He drank more scotch and said he still believed his wife would come back to him, in the fullness of time.

Absent from the nuptials, of course, was Peter’s father. The government of St. Kitts-Nevis continued to resist American pressure to extradite the five Sweeting-Aldren executives, and it now appeared the men would never be brought to trial unless they were foolish enough to reenter the country of their own accord. Stoorhuys had gotten wind of his son’s engagement — possibly from The New York Times, which carried the announcement, but more likely from his wife. On Christmas Eve the mailman brought Peter and Eileen an envelope with a Caribbean postmark and a hand-written message on its flap: To Be Opened At Your Wedding And Read Aloud. Peter chucked it in the trash.

In the spring there were two more weddings. The first — that of Howard Chun and Sally Go — took place in New York, and the Pleasant Avenue contingent was not invited. Renée heard about it afterward in the computer room, from Howard’s second groomsman, Terry Snall. Terry said there had been a traditional Chinese banquet for more than two hundred people. He said it had been a very interesting cultural experience for him.

The second wedding, in late April, was actually just an afternoon reception at the Hotel Charles, Alec Bressler and Joyce Edelstein having tied the knot a week earlier in the Middlesex County courthouse. A sizable chunk of Boston’s liberal elite turned out for the reception, plus a few of Alec’s former DJs (who accounted for nearly all of the heavy drinking) and Louis and Renée. Joyce Edelstein twice broke away from well-wishers of her own class to put her arm around Renée and tell her she’d been dying to meet her and wanted to have a long talk; but somehow the conversation never happened.

Alec, however, had news for Louis.

“A new station,” he said, leading him away from Renée. “Is a wedding present from the bride. FM 92.2. She agrees I have no politics, I agree I show profit after fourth quarter. Is an oral agreement we have. Profit means I do music in the daytime. I don’t know music, it all sounds same to my ear. But then I have the nighttime for good programming. So, so, are you ready to work?”

“Me?”

“Music program to start with, also noose work or in-house ads. Your choice. Is only daytime hours, not bad, eh?”

“And a minimum wage and no benefits.”

“So, OK, but only till fourth quarter. Then we see.”

“This is very nice of you, Alec—”

“Not nice. Self-interest!”

“But I’ll have to think about it.”

Alec ducked. “Sink fast. I’m on the air June first.”

The dance band was starting its third set when Louis and Renée left the hotel. It was such a fine day that they had walked to the Square in their party clothes. The sun was setting now, but its warmth still hung in the trees of Cambridge, along with the remains of kites and aluminumized balloons, hopelessly snarled plastic grocery bags, sneakers joined at the laces, tattered sweatshirts and streamers of magnetic tape, and with the trees’ own green leaves. In the countryside north and south of Boston the forests were still gray, but a yellowness commenced in the far suburbs and grew to a pale green as Nature learned for better or worse to trust the warmth of civilization, until finally in the inner suburbs and the city all the foliage was out in force, and it was almost summer.

“Tell me why you even have to think about it,” Renée said.

“Just because I have to.”

“You don’t think you’ve been making copies long enough? You think Alec’s being too nice to you?”

“It means at least another year for you with Snall and Chun.”

“As long as it’s not forever, I don’t care.”

“Still have to think about it.”

“Why won’t you be happy? Why won’t you let yourself?”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“How can we ever live, if you’re not happy? How can we think about, I don’t know, having a baby or—”

“Baby?”

“Well, just for an example.”

He stopped and stared at Renée. They were on the sidewalk of the Dane Street bridge. “You’d consider having a baby with me?”

“I might,” she said.

“You and me. We do the thing and you get pregnant and we have a baby.”

“Don’t you ever think about it? I could see doing it if we were both happy.”

“Well. Huh!”

“Don’t you ever want to with me? Don’t you ever think about how we could already have one right now? How old she’d be right now? And who she’d look like? Aren’t you ever sorry, even a little bit?”

He walked away from her, over the crest of the bridge and down the other side. He was reaching into the familiar place inside him, but what he found there didn’t feel like a sorrow anymore. He wondered if it had really been a sorrow to begin with.

“Oh, what’s wrong, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I swear to you. I just have to walk now. Walk with me, come on. We have to keep walking.”