T. C. Boyle Stories

MODERN LOVE

There was no exchange of body fluids on the first date, and that suited both of us just fine. I picked her up at seven, took her to Mee Grop, where she meticulously separated each sliver of meat from her Phat Thai, watched her down four bottles of Singha at three dollars per, and then gently stroked her balsam-smelling hair while she snoozed through The Terminator at the Circle Shopping Center theater. We had a late-night drink at Rigoletto’s Pizza Bar (and two slices, plain cheese), and I dropped her off. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.

“It’s been fun,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, taking her hand.

She was wearing gloves.

“I’ll call you,” she said.

“Good,” I said, giving her my richest smile. “And I’ll call you.”

On the second date we got acquainted.

“I can’t tell you what a strain it was for me the other night,” she said, staring down into her chocolate-mocha-fudge sundae. It was early afternoon, we were in Helmut’s Olde Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in Mamaroneck, and the sun streamed through the thick frosted windows and lit the place like a convalescent home. The fixtures glowed behind the counter, the brass rail was buffed to a reflective sheen, and everything smelled of disinfectant. We were the only people in the place.

“What do you mean?” I said, my mouth glutinous with melted marshmallow and caramel.

“I mean Thai food, the seats in the movie theater, the ladies’ room in that place for god’s sake …”

“Thai food?” I wasn’t following her. I recalled the maneuver with the strips of pork and the fastidious dissection of the glass noodles. “You’re a vegetarian?”

She looked away in exasperation, and then gave me the full, wide-eyed shock of her ice-blue eyes. “Have you seen the Health Department statistics on sanitary conditions in ethnic restaurants?”

I hadn’t.

Her eyebrows leapt up. She was earnest. She was lecturing. “These people are refugees. They have — well, different standards. They haven’t even been inoculated.” I watched her dig the tiny spoon into the recesses of the dish and part her lips for a neat, foursquare morsel of ice cream and fudge.

“The illegals, anyway. And that’s half of them.” She swallowed with an almost imperceptible movement, a shudder, her throat dipping and rising like a gazelle’s. “I got drunk from fear,” she said. “Blind panic. I couldn’t help thinking I’d wind up with hepatitis or dysentery or dengue fever or something.”

“Dengue fever?”

“I usually bring a disposable sanitary sheet for public theaters — just think of who might have been in that seat before you, and how many times, and what sort of nasty festering little cultures of this and that there must be in all those ancient dribbles of taffy and Coke and extra-butter popcorn — but I didn’t want you to think I was too extreme or anything on the first date, so I didn’t. And then the ladies’ room … You don’t think I’m overreacting, do you?”

As a matter of fact, I did. Of course I did. I liked Thai food — and sushi and ginger crab and greasy souvlaki at the corner stand too. There was the look of the mad saint in her eye, the obsessive, the mortifier of the flesh, but I didn’t care. She was lovely, wilting, clear-eyed, and pure, as cool and matchless as if she’d stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and I was in love. Besides, I tended a little that way myself. Hypochondria. Anal retentiveness. The ordered environment and alphabetized books. I was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, I carried some scars and I read the newspapers — herpes, AIDS, the Asian clap that foiled every antibiotic in the book. I was willing to take it slow. “No,” I said, “I don’t think you’re overreacting at all.”

I paused to draw in a breath so deep it might have been a sigh. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, giving her a doglike look of contrition. “I didn’t know.”

She reached out then and touched my hand — touched it, skin to skin — and murmured that it was all right, she’d been through worse. “If you want to know,” she breathed, “I like places like this.”

I glanced around. The place was still empty, but for Helmut, in a blinding white jumpsuit and toque, studiously polishing the tile walls. “I know what you mean,” I said.

We dated for a month — museums, drives in the country, French and German restaurants, ice-cream emporia, fern bars — before we kissed. And when we kissed, after a showing of David and Lisa at a revival house all the way up in Rhinebeck and on a night so cold no run-of-the-mill bacterium or commonplace virus could have survived it, it was the merest brushing of the lips. She was wearing a big-shouldered coat of synthetic fur and a knit hat pulled down over her brow and she hugged my arm as we stepped out of the theater and into the blast of the night. “God,” she said, “did you see him when he screamed ‘You touched me!’? Wasn’t that priceless?” Her eyes were big and she seemed weirdly excited. “Sure,” I said, “yeah, it was great,” and then she pulled me close and kissed me. I felt the soft flicker of her lips against mine. “I love you,” she said, “I think.”

A month of dating and one dry fluttering kiss. At this point you might begin to wonder about me, but really, I didn’t mind. As I say, I was willing to wait — I had the patience of Sisyphus — and it was enough just to be with her. Why rush things? I thought. This is good, this is charming, like the slow sweet unfolding of the romance in a Frank Capra movie, where sweetness and light always prevail. Sure, she had her idiosyncrasies, but who didn’t? Frankly, I’d never been comfortable with the three-drinks-dinner-and-bed sort of thing, the girls who come on like they’ve been in prison for six years and just got out in time to put on their makeup and jump into the passenger seat of your car. Breda — that was her name, Breda Drumhill, and the very sound and syllabification of it made me melt — was different.

Finally, two weeks after the trek to Rhinebeck, she invited me to her apartment. Cocktails, she said. Dinner. A quiet evening in front of the tube.

She lived in Croton, on the ground floor of a restored Victorian, half a mile from the Harmon station, where she caught the train each morning for Manhattan and her job as an editor of Anthropology Today. She’d held the job since graduating from Barnard six years earlier (with a double major in Rhetoric and Alien Cultures), and it suited her temperament perfectly. Field anthropologists living among the River Dyak of Borneo or the Kurds of Kurdistan would send her rough and grammatically tortured accounts of their observations and she would whip them into shape for popular consumption. Naturally, filth and exotic disease, as well as outlandish customs and revolting habits, played a leading role in her rewrites. Every other day or so she’d call me from work and in a voice that could barely contain its joy give me the details of some new and horrific disease she’d discovered.

She met me at the door in a silk kimono that featured a plunging neckline and a pair of dragons with intertwined tails. Her hair was pinned up as if she’d just stepped out of the bath and she smelled of Noxzema and pHisoHex. She pecked my cheek, took the bottle of Vouvray I held out in offering, and led me into the front room. “Chagas’ disease,” she said, grinning wide to show off her perfect, outsized teeth.

“Chagas’ disease?” I echoed, not quite knowing what to do with myself. The room was as spare as a monk’s cell. Two chairs, a loveseat, and a coffee table, in glass, chrome, and hard black plastic. No plants (“God knows what sort of insects might live on them — and the dirt, the dirt has got to be crawling with bacteria, not to mention spiders and worms and things”) and no rug (“A breeding ground for fleas and ticks and chiggers”).

Still grinning, she steered me to the hard black plastic loveseat and sat down beside me, the Vouvray cradled in her lap. “South America,” she whispered, her eyes leaping with excitement. “In the jungle. These bugs — assassin bugs, they’re called — isn’t that wild? These bugs bite you and then, after they’ve sucked on you a while, they go potty next to the wound. When you scratch, it gets into your bloodstream, and anywhere from one to twenty years later you get a disease that’s like a cross between malaria and AIDS.”

“And then you die,” I said.

“And then you die.”

Her voice had turned somber. She wasn’t grinning any longer. What could I say? I patted her hand and flashed a smile. “Yum,” I said, mugging for her.

“What’s for dinner?”

She served a cold cream-of-tofu-carrot soup and little lentil-paste sandwiches for an appetizer and a garlic soufflé with biologically controlled vegetables for the entree. Then it was snifters of cognac, the big-screen TV, and a movie called The Boy in the Bubble, about a kid raised in a totally antiseptic environment because he was born without an immune system. No one could touch him. Even the slightest sneeze would have killed him. Breda sniffled through the first half-hour, then pressed my hand and sobbed openly as the boy finally crawled out of the bubble, caught about thirty-seven different diseases, and died before the commercial break. “I’ve seen this movie six times now,” she said, fighting to control her voice, “and it gets to me every time. What a life,” she said, waving her snifter at the screen, “what a perfect life. Don’t you envy him?”

I didn’t envy him. I envied the jade pendant that dangled between her breasts and I told her so.

She might have giggled or gasped or lowered her eyes, but she didn’t. She gave me a long slow look, as if she were deciding something, and then she allowed herself to blush, the color suffusing her throat in a delicious mottle of pink and white. “Give me a minute,” she said mysteriously, and disappeared into the bathroom.

I was electrified. This was it. Finally. After all the avowals, the pressed hands, the little jokes and routines, after all the miles driven, meals consumed, muse-urns paced, and movies watched, we were finally, naturally, gracefully going to come together in the ultimate act of intimacy and love.

I felt hot. There were beads of sweat on my forehead. I didn’t know whether to stand or sit. And then the lights dimmed, and there she was at the rheostat.

She was still in her kimono, but her hair was pinned up more severely, wound in a tight coil to the crown of her head, as if she’d girded herself for battle. And she held something in her hand — a slim package, wrapped in plastic. It rustled as she crossed the room.

“When you’re in love, you make love,” she said, easing down beside me on the rocklike settee, “—it’s only natural.” She handed me the package. “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,” she said, her voice throaty and raw, “just because I’m careful and modest and because there’s so much, well, filth in the world, but I have my passionate side too. I do. And I love you, I think.”

“Yes,” I said, groping for her, the package all but forgotten.

We kissed. I rubbed the back of her neck, felt something strange, an odd sag and ripple, as if her skin had suddenly turned to Saran Wrap, and then she had her hand on my chest. “Wait,” she breathed, “the, the thing.”

I sat up. “Thing?”

The light was dim but I could see the blush invade her face now. She was sweet. Oh, she was sweet, my Little Em’ly, my Victorian princess. “It’s Swedish,” she said.

I looked down at the package in my lap. It was a clear, skin-like sheet of plastic, folded up in its transparent package like a heavy-duty garbage bag. I held it up to her huge, trembling eyes. A crazy idea darted in and out of my head. No, I thought.

“It’s the newest thing,” she said, the words coming in a rush, “the safest … I mean, nothing could possibly—”

My face was hot. “No,” I said.

“It’s a condom,” she said, tears starting up in her eyes, “my doctor got them for me they’re … they’re Swedish.” Her face wrinkled up and she began to cry. “It’s a condom,” she sobbed, crying so hard the kimono fell open and I could see the outline of the thing against the swell of her nipples, “a full-body condom.”

I was offended. I admit it. It wasn’t so much her obsession with germs and contagion, but that she didn’t trust me after all that time. I was clean. Quintessentially clean. I was a man of moderate habits and good health, I changed my underwear and socks daily — sometimes twice a day — and I worked in an office, with clean, crisp, unequivocal numbers, managing my late father’s chain of shoe stores (and he died cleanly himself, of a myocardial infarction, at seventy-five). “But Breda,” I said, reaching out to console her and brushing her soft, plastic-clad breast in the process, “don’t you trust me? Don’t you believe in me? Don’t you, don’t you love me?” I took her by the shoulders, lifted her head, forced her to look me in the eye. “I’m clean,” I said. “Trust me.”

She looked away. “Do it for me,” she said in her smallest voice, “if you really love me.”

In the end, I did it. I looked at her, crying, crying for me, and I looked at the thin sheet of plastic clinging to her, and I did it. She helped me into the thing, poked two holes for my nostrils, zipped the plastic zipper up the back, and pulled it tight over my head. It fit like a wetsuit. And the whole thing — the stroking and the tenderness and the gentle yielding — was everything I’d hoped it would be.

Almost.

She called me from work the next day. I was playing with sales figures and thinking of her. “Hello,” I said, practically cooing into the receiver.

“You’ve got to hear this.” Her voice was giddy with excitement.

“Hey,” I said, cutting her off in a passionate whisper, “last night was really special.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “yes, last night. It was. And I love you, I do …” She paused to draw in her breath. “But listen to this: I just got a piece from a man and his wife living among the Tuareg of Nigeria — these are the people who follow cattle around, picking up the dung for their cooking fires?”

I made a small noise of awareness.

“Well, they make their huts of dung too — isn’t that wild? And guess what — when times are hard, when the crops fail and the cattle can barely stand up, you know what they eat?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Dung?”

She let out a whoop. “Yes! Yes! Isn’t it too much? They eat dung!”

I’d been saving one for her, a disease a doctor friend had told me about.

“Onchocerciasis,” I said. “You know it?”

There was a thrill in her voice. “Tell me.”

“South America and Africa both. A fly bites you and lays its eggs in your bloodstream and when the eggs hatch, the larvae — these little white worms — migrate to your eyeballs, right underneath the membrane there, so you can see them wriggling around.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

“Breda?”

“That’s sick,” she said. “That’s really sick.”

But I thought—? I trailed off. “Sorry,” I said.

“Listen,” and the edge came back into her voice, “the reason I called is because I love you, I think I love you, and I want you to meet somebody.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I want you to meet Michael. Michael Maloney.”

“Sure. Who’s he?”

She hesitated, paused just a beat, as if she knew she was going too far. “My doctor,” she said.

You have to work at love. You have to bend, make subtle adjustments, sacrifices — love is nothing without sacrifice. I went to Dr. Maloney. Why not? I’d eaten tofu, bantered about leprosy and bilharziasis as if I were immune, and made love in a bag. If it made Breda happy — if it eased the nagging fears that ate at her day and night — then it was worth it.

The doctor’s office was in Scarsdale, in his home, a two-tone mock Tudor with a winding drive and oaks as old as my grandfather’s Chrysler. He was a young man — late thirties, I guessed — with a red beard, shaved head, and a pair of oversized spectacles in clear plastic frames. He took me right away — the very day I called — and met me at the door himself. “Breda’s told me about you,” he said, leading me into the floodlit vault of his office. He looked at me appraisingly a moment, murmuring “Yes, yes” into his beard, and then, with the aid of his nurses, Miss Archibald and Miss Slivovitz, put me through a battery of tests that would have embarrassed an astronaut.

First, there were the measurements, including digital joints, maxilla, cranium, penis, and earlobe. Next, the rectal exam, the EEG and urine sample. And then the tests. Stress tests, patch tests, reflex tests, lung-capacity tests (I blew up yellow balloons till they popped, then breathed into a machine the size of a Hammond organ), the X-rays, sperm count, and a closely printed, twenty-four-page questionnaire that included sections on dream analysis, genealogy, and logic and reasoning. He drew blood too, of course — to test vital-organ function and exposure to disease. “We’re testing for antibodies to over fifty diseases,” he said, eyes dodging behind the walls of his lenses. “You’d be surprised how many people have been infected without even knowing it.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. On the way out he took my arm and told me he’d have the results in a week.

That week was the happiest of my life. I was with Breda every night, and over the weekend we drove up to Vermont to stay at a hygiene center her cousin had told her about. We dined by candlelight — on real food — and afterward we donned the Saran Wrap suits and made joyous, sanitary love. I wanted more, of course — the touch of skin on skin — but I was fulfilled and I was happy. Go slow, I told myself. All things in time. One night, as we lay entwined in the big white fortress of her bed, I stripped back the hood of the plastic suit and asked her if she’d ever trust me enough to make love in the way of the centuries, raw and unprotected. She twisted free of her own wrapping and looked away, giving me that matchless patrician profile. “Yes,” she said, her voice pitched low, “yes, of course. Once the results are in.”

“Results?”

She turned to me, her eyes searching mine. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

I had. Carried away, intense, passionate, brimming with love, I’d forgotten. “Silly you,” she murmured, tracing the line of my lips with a slim, plastic-clad finger. “Does the name Michael Maloney ring a bell?”

And then the roof fell in.

I called and there was no answer. I tried her at work and her secretary said she was out. I left messages. She never called back. It was as if we’d never known one another, as if I were a stranger, a door-to-door salesman, a beggar on the street.

I took up a vigil in front of her house. For a solid week I sat in my parked car and watched the door with all the fanatic devotion of a pilgrim at a shrine. Nothing. She neither came nor went. I rang the phone off the hook, interrogated her friends, haunted the elevator, the hallway, and the reception room at her office. She’d disappeared.

Finally, in desperation, I called her cousin in Larchmont. I’d met her once — she was a homely, droopy-sweatered, baleful-looking girl who represented everything gone wrong in the genes that had come to such glorious fruition in Breda — and barely knew what to say to her. I’d made up a speech, something about how my mother was dying in Phoenix, the business was on the rocks, I was drinking too much and dwelling on thoughts of suicide, destruction, and final judgment, and I had to talk to Breda just one more time before the end, and did she by any chance know where she was? As it turned out, I didn’t need the speech. Breda answered the phone.

“Breda, it’s me,” I choked. “I’ve been going crazy looking for you.”

Silence.

“Breda, what’s wrong? Didn’t you get my messages?”

Her voice was halting, distant. “I can’t see you anymore,” she said.

“Can’t see me?” I was stunned, hurt, angry. “What do you mean?”

“All those feet,” she said.

“Feet?” It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the shoe business. “But I don’t deal with anybody’s feet — I work in an office. Like you. With air-conditioning and sealed windows. I haven’t touched a foot since I was sixteen.”

“Athlete’s foot,” she said. “Psoriasis. Eczema. Jungle rot.”

“What is it? The physical?” My voice cracked with outrage. “Did I flunk the damn physical? Is that it?”

She wouldn’t answer me.

A chill went through me. “What did he say? What did the son of a bitch say?”

There was a distant ticking over the line, the pulse of time and space, the gentle sway of Bell Telephone’s hundred million miles of wire.

“Listen,” I pleaded, “see me one more time, just once — that’s all I ask. We’ll talk it over. We could go on a picnic. In the park. We could spread a blanket and, and we could sit on opposite corners—”

“Lyme disease,” she said.

“Lyme disease?”

“Spread by tick bite. They’re seething in the grass. You get Bell’s palsy, meningitis, the lining of your brain swells up like dough.”

“Rockefeller Center then,” I said. “By the fountain.”

Her voice was dead. “Pigeons,” she said. “They’re like flying rats.”

“Helmut’s. We can meet at Helmut’s. Please. I love you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Breda, please listen to me. We were so close—”

“Yes,” she said, “we were close,” and I thought of that first night in her apartment, the boy in the bubble and the Saran Wrap suit, thought of the whole dizzy spectacle of our romance till her voice came down like a hammer on the refrain, “but not that close.”

(1987)

IKE AND NINA

The years have put a lid on it, the principals passed into oblivion. I think I can now, in good conscience, reveal the facts surrounding one of the most secretive and spectacular love affairs of our time: the affaire de coeur that linked the thirty-fourth president of the United States and the then first lady of the Soviet Union. Yes: the eagle and the bear, defrosting the Cold War with the heat of their passion, Dwight D: Eisenhower — Ike — virile, dashing, athletic, in the arms of Madame Nina Khrushcheva, the svelte and seductive schoolmistress from the Ukraine. Behind closed doors, in embassy restrooms and hotel corridors, they gave themselves over to the urgency of their illicit love, while the peace and stability of the civilized world hung in the balance.

Because of the sensitive — indeed sensational — nature of what follows, I have endeavored to tell my story as dispassionately as possible, and must say in my own defense that my sole interest in coming forward at this late date is to provide succeeding generations with a keener insight into the events of those tumultuous times. Some of you will be shocked by what I report here, others moved. Still others — the inevitable naysayers and skeptics — may find it difficult to believe. But before you turn a deaf ear, let me remind you how unthinkable it once seemed to credit reports of Errol Flynn’s flirtation with Nazis and homosexuals, FDR’s thirty-year obsession with Lucy Mercer, or Ted Kennedy’s overmastering desire for an ingenuous campaign worker eleven years his junior. The truth is often hard to swallow. But no historian worth his salt, no self-respecting journalist, no faithful eyewitness to the earthshaking and epoch-making events of human history has ever blanched at it.

Here then, is the story of Ike and Nina.

In September of 1959, I was assistant to one of Ike’s junior staffers, thirty-one years old, schooled in international law, and a consultant to the Slavic-languages program at one of our major universities.* I’d had very little contact with the president, had in fact laid eyes on him but twice in the eighteen months I’d worked for the White House (the first time, I was looking for a drinking fountain when I caught a glimpse of him — a single flash of his radiant brow — huddled in a back room with Foster Dulles and Andy Goodpaster; a week later, as I was hurrying down a corridor with a stack of reports for shredding, I spotted him slipping out a service entrance with his golf clubs). Like dozens of bright, ambitious young men apprenticed to the mighty, I was at this stage of my career a mere functionary, a paper shuffler, so deeply buried in the power structure I must actually have ranked below the pastry chef’s croissant twister. I was good — I had no doubt of it — but I was as yet untried, and for all I knew unnoticed. You can imagine my surprise when early one morning I was summoned to the Oval Office.

It was muggy, and though the corridors hummed with the gentle ministrations of the air conditioners, my shirt was soaked through by the time I reached the door of the president’s inner sanctum. A crewcut ramrod in uniform swung open the door, barked out my name, and ushered me into the room. I was puzzled, apprehensive, awed; the door closed behind me with a soft click and I found myself in the Oval Office, alone with the president of the United States. Ike was standing at the window, gazing out at the trees, whistling “The Flirtation Waltz,” and turning a book of crossword puzzles over in his hands. “Well,” he said, turning to me and extending his hand, “Mr. Paderewski, is that right?”

“Yes sir,” I said. He pronounced it “Paderooski.”†

“Well,” he repeated, taking me in with those steely blue eyes of his as he sauntered across the room and tossed the book on his desk like a slugger casually dropping his bat after knocking the ball out of the park. He looked like a golf pro, a gymnast, a competitor, a man who could come at you with both hands and a nine iron to boot. Don’t be taken in by all those accounts of his declining health — I saw him there that September morning in the Oval Office, broad-shouldered and trim-waisted, lithe and commanding. Successive heart attacks and a bout with ileitis hadn’t slowed the old warrior a bit. A couple of weeks short of his sixty-ninth birthday, and he was jaunty as a high-schooler on prom night. Which brings me back to the reason for my summons.

“You’re a good egg, aren’t you, Paderewski?” Ike asked.

I replied in the affirmative.

“And you speak Russian, is that right?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President — and Polish, Sorbian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovene as well.”

He grunted, and eased his haunch down on the corner of the desk. The light from the window played off his head till it glowed like a second sun. “You’re aware of the upcoming visit of the Soviet premier and his, uh, wife?”

I nodded.

“Good, that’s very good, Paderewski, because as of this moment I’m appointing you my special aide for the duration of that visit.” He looked at me as if I were some odd and insignificant form of life that might bear further study under the microscope, looked at me like the man who had driven armies across Europe and laid Hitler in his grave. “Everything that happens, every order I give you, is to be held strictly confidential — top secret — is that understood?”

I was filled with a sense of mission, importance, dignity. Here I was, elevated from the ranks to lend my modest talents to the service of the first citizen of the nation, the commander-in-chief himself. “Understood, Mr. President,” I said, fighting the impulse to salute.

This seemed to relax him, and he leaned back on the desk and told me a long, involved story about an article he’d come across in the National Geographic, something about Egyptian pyramids and how the members of a pharaoh’s funeral procession were either blinded on the spot or entombed with their leaders — something along those lines. I didn’t know what to make of it. So I put on my meditative look, and when he finished I flashed him a smile that would have melted ice.

Ike smiled back.

By now, of course, I’m sure you’ve guessed just what my special duties were to consist of — I was to be the president’s liaison with Mrs. Khrushchev, a go-between, a pillow smoother and excuse maker: I was to be Ike’s panderer. Looking back on it, I can say in all honesty that I did not then, nor do I now, feel any qualms whatever regarding my role in the affair. No, I feel privileged to have witnessed one of the grand passions of our time, a love both tender and profane, a love that smoldered beneath the watchful eyes of two embattled nations and erupted in an explosion of passionate embraces and hungry kisses.

Ike, as I was later to learn, had first fallen under the spell of Madame K. in 1945, during his triumphal visit to Moscow after the fall of the Third Reich. It was the final day of his visit, a momentous day, the day Japan had thrown in the towel and the great war was at long last ended. Ambassador Harriman arranged a reception and buffet supper at the U.S. embassy by way of celebration, and to honor Ike and his comrade-in-arms, Marshal Zhukov. In addition to Ike’s small party, a number of high-ranking Russian military men and politicos turned out for what evolved into an uproarious evening of singing, dancing, and congratulatory back-slapping. Corks popped, vodka flowed, the exuberant clamor of voices filled the room. And then Nina Khrushcheva stepped through the door.

Ike was stunned. Suddenly nothing existed for him — not Zhukov, not Moscow, not Harriman, the armistice, or “The Song of the Volga Boatmen,” which an instant before had been ringing in his ears — there was only this vision in the doorway, simple, unadorned, elegant, this true princess of the earth. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know who she was; the only words of Russian he could command—zdrav’st and spasibo*—flew to his lips like an unanswered prayer. He begged Harriman for an introduction, and then spent the rest of the evening at her side, the affable Ike, gazing into the quiet depths of her rich mud-brown eyes, entranced. He didn’t need an interpreter.

It would be ten long years before their next meeting, years that would see the death of Stalin, the ascendancy of Khrushchev, and Ike’s own meteoric rise to political prominence as the thirty-fourth president of the United States. Through all that time, through all the growing enmity between their countries, Ike and Nina cherished that briefest memory of one another. For his part, Ike felt he had seen a vision, sipped from the cup of perfection, and that no other woman could hope to match it — not Mamie, not Ann Whitman, nor even his old flame, the lovely and adept Kay Summersby. He plowed through CIA dossiers on this captivating spirit, Nina Petrovna, wife of the Soviet premier, maintained a scrapbook crammed with photos of her and news clippings detailing her husband’s movements; twice, at the risk of everything, he was able to communicate with her through the offices of a discreet and devoted agent of the CIA. In July of 1955, he flew to Geneva, hungering for peaceful coexistence.

At the Geneva Conference, the two came together once again, and what had begun ten years earlier as a riveting infatuation blossomed into the mature and passionate love that would haunt them the rest of their days. Ike was sixty-five, in his prime, the erect warrior, the canny leader, a man who could shake off a stroke as if it were a head cold; Nina, ten years his junior, was in the flush of womanly maturity, lovely, solid, a soft inscrutable smile playing on her elfin lips. With a subterfuge that would have tied the intelligence networks of their respective countries in knots, the two managed to steal ten minutes here, half an hour there — they managed, despite the talks, the dinners, the receptions, and the interminable, stultifying rounds of speechmaking, to appease their desire and sanctify their love forever. “Without personal contact,” Ike said at a dinner for the Russian delegation, his boyish blue eyes fixed on Mrs. Khrushchev, “you might imagine someone was fourteen feet high, with horns and a tail.” Russians and Americans alike burst into spontaneous laughter and applause. Nina Petrovna, first lady of the Soviet Union, stared down at her chicken Kiev and blushed.

And so, when the gargantuan Soviet TU 114 shrieked into Andrews Air Force Base in September of 1959, I stood by my president with a lump in my throat: I alone knew just how much the Soviet visit meant to him, I alone knew by how tenuous a thread hung the balance of world peace. What could the president have been thinking as the great sleek jet touched down? I can only conjecture. Perhaps he was thinking that she’d forgotten him, or that the scrutiny of the press would make it impossible for them to steal their precious few moments together, or that her husband — that torpedo-headed bully boy — would discover them and tear the world to pieces with his rage. Consider Ike at that moment, consider the all-but-insurmountable barriers thrown in his way, and you can appreciate my calling him one of the truly impassioned lovers of all time. Romeo had nothing on him, nor Douglas Fairbanks either — even the starry-eyed Edward Windsor pales by comparison. At any rate, he leaped at his opportunity like a desert nomad delivered to the oasis: there would be an assignation that very night, and I was to be instrumental in arranging it.

After the greeting ceremonies at Andrews, during which Ike could do no more than exchange smiles and handshakes with the premier and premiersha, there was a formal state dinner at the White House. Ambassador Menshikov was there, Khrushchev and his party, Ike and Mamie, Christian Herter, Dick Nixon, and others; afterward, the ladies retired to the Red Room for coffee. I sat at Ike’s side throughout dinner, and lingered in the hallway outside the Red Room directly thereafter. At dinner, Ike had kissed Madame K.’s hand and chatted animatedly with her for a few minutes, but they covered their emotions so well that no one would have guessed they were anything other than amenable strangers wearing their social faces. Only I knew better.

I caught the premiersha as she and Mamie emerged from the Red Room in a burst of photographers’ flashbulbs. As instructed, I took her arm and escorted her to the East Room, for the program of American songs that would highlight the evening. I spoke to her in Russian, though to my surprise she seemed to have a rudimentary grasp of conversational English (did she recall it from her school-teaching days, or had she boned up for Ike?). Like a Cyrano, I told her that the president yearned for her tragically, that he’d thought of nothing else in the four years since Geneva, and then I recited a love poem he’d written her in English — I can’t recall the sense of it now, but it boiled with Elizabethan conceits and the imagery of war, with torn hearts, manned bastions, and references to heavy ordnance, pillboxes, and scaling the heights of love. Finally, just before we entered the East Room, I pressed a slip of paper into her hand. It read, simply: 3:00 A.M., back door, Blair House.

At five of three, in a rented, unmarked limousine, the president and I pulled up at the curb just down the street from Blair House, where the Khrushchev party had been installed for the night. I was driving. The rear panel slid back and the president’s voice leaped at me out of the darkness: “Okay, Paderewski, do your stuff — and good luck.”

I eased out of the car and started up the walk. The night was warm and damp, the darkness a cloak, street lights dulled as if they’d been shaded for the occasion. Every shadow was of course teeming with Secret Service agents — there were enough of them ringing the house to fill Memorial Stadium twice over — but they gave way for me. (Ike had arranged it thus: one person was to be allowed to enter the rear of Blair House at the stroke of three; two would be leaving an instant thereafter.)

She was waiting for me at the back door, dressed in pants and a man’s overcoat and hat. “Madame Khrushcheva?” I whispered. “Da,” came the reply, soft as a kiss. We hurried across the yard and I handed her into the car, admiring Ike’s cleverness: if anyone — including the legion of Secret Service, CIA, and FBI men — had seen us, they would have mistaken the madame for her husband and concluded that Ike had set up a private, ultrasecret conference. I slid into the driver’s seat and Ike’s voice, shaken with emotion, came at me again: “Drive, Paderewski,” he said. “Drive us to the stars.” And then the panel shot to with a passionate click.

For two hours I circled the capitol, and then, as prearranged, I returned to Blair House and parked just down the street. I could hear them — Ike and Nina, whispering, embracing, rustling clothing — as I cut the engine. She giggled. Ike was whistling. She giggled again, a lovely windchime of a sound, musical and coltish — if I hadn’t known better I would have thought Ike was back there with a coed. I was thinking with some satisfaction that we’d just about pulled it off when the panel slid back and Ike said: “Okay, Paderewski — let’s hit it.” There was the sound of a protracted kiss, a sound we all recognize not so much through experience — who’s listening, after all? — but thanks to the attention Hollywood sound men have given it. Then Ike’s final words to her, delivered in a passionate susurrus, words etched in my memory as if in stone; “Till we meet again,” he whispered.

Something odd happened just then, just as I swung back the door for Mrs. Khrushchev: a car was moving along the street in the opposite direction, a foreign car, and it slowed as she stepped from the limousine. Just that — it slowed — and nothing more. I hardly remarked it at the time, but that instant was to reverberate in history. The engine ticked up the street, crickets chirruped. With all dispatch, I got Mrs. Khrushchev round back of Blair House, saw her in the door, and returned to the limousine.

“Well done, Paderewski, well done,” Ike said as I put the car in drive and headed up the street, and then he did something he hadn’t done in years — lit a cigarette. I watched the glow of the match in the rearview mirror, and then he was exhaling with rich satisfaction, as if he’d just come back from swimming the Potomac or taming a mustang in one of those televised cigarette ads. “The White House,” he said. “Chop-chop.”

Six hours later, Madame K. appeared with her husband on the front steps of Blair House and fielded questions from reporters. She wore a modest gray silk chemise and a splash of lipstick. One of the reporters asked her what she was most interested in seeing while touring the U.S., and she glanced over at her husband before replying (he was grinning to show off his pointed teeth, as impervious to English as he might have been to Venusian). “Whatever is of biggest interest to Mr. Khrushchev,” she said. The reporters lapped it up: flashbulbs popped, a flurry of stories went out over the wire. Who would have guessed?

From there, the Khrushchevs took a special VIP train to New York, where Madame K. attended a luncheon at the Waldorf and her husband harangued a group of business magnates in Averell Harriman’s living room. “The Moscow Cha-Cha” and Jimmy Driftwood’s “The Bear Flew Over the Ocean” blared from every radio in town, and a special squad of NYPD’s finest — six-footers, experts in jujitsu and marksmanship — formed a human wall around the premier and his wife as they took in the sights of the Big Apple. New York rolled out the red carpet, and the Khrushchevs trod it with a stately satisfaction that rapidly gave way to finger-snapping, heel-kicking glee. As the premier boarded the plane for Los Angeles, Nina at his side, he mugged for cameras, kissed babies, and shook hands so assiduously he might have been running for office.

And then the bottom fell out.

In Los Angeles, ostensibly because he was nettled at Mayor Paulson’s hardline speech and because he discovered that Disneyland would not be on his itinerary, the raging, tabletop-pounding, Magyar-cowing Khrushchev came to the fore: he threw a tantrum. The people of the United States were inhospitable boors — they’d invited him to fly halfway round the world simply to abuse him. He’d had enough. He was curtailing the trip and heading back to Moscow.

I was with Ike when the first reports of the premier’s explosion flashed across the TV screen. Big-bellied and truculent, Khrushchev was lecturing the nation on points of etiquette, jowls atremble, fists beating the air, while Nina, her head bowed, stood meekly at his side. Ike’s voice was so pinched it could have come from a ventriloquist’s dummy: “My God,” he whispered, “he knows.” (I suddenly remembered the car slowing, the flash of a pale face behind the darkened glass, and thought of Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the vast network of Soviet spies operating unchecked in the land of the free: they’d seen her after all.) Shaking his head, Ike got up, crossed the room, and lit another verboten cigarette. He looked weary, immeasurably old, Rip Van Winkle waking beside his rusted gun. “Well, Paderewski,” he sighed, a blue haze playing round the wisps of silver hair at his temples, “I guess now the shit’s really going to hit the fan.”

He was right, but only partially. To his credit, Khrushchev covered himself like a trouper — after all, how could he reveal so shocking and outrageous a business as this without losing face himself, without transforming himself in that instant from the virile, bellicose, iron-fisted ruler of the Soviet masses to a pudgy, pathetic cuckold? He allowed himself to be mollified by apologies from Paulson and Cabot Lodge over the supposed insult, posed for a photograph with Shirley MacLaine at Twentieth Century-Fox, and then flew on to San Francisco for a tense visit. He made a dilatory stop in Iowa on his way back to Washington and the inevitable confrontation with the man who had suddenly emerged as his rival in love as well as ideology. (I’m sure you recall the celebrated photographs in Life, Look, and Newsweek—Khrushchev leering at a phallic ear of corn, patting the belly of a crewcut interloper at the Garst farm in Iowa, hefting a piglet by the scruff of its neck. Study them today — especially in contrast to the pre-Los Angeles photos — and you’ll be struck by the mixture of jealous rage and incomprehension playing across the premier’s features, and the soft, tragic, downcast look in his wife’s eyes.)

I sat beside the president on the way out to Camp David for the talks that would culminate the Khrushchev visit. He was subdued, desolated, the animation gone out of his voice. He’d planned for these talks as he’d planned for the European Campaign, devising stratagems and feints, studying floorplans, mapping the territory, confident he could spirit away his inamorata for an idyllic hour or two beneath the pines. Now there was no chance of it. No chance, in fact, that he’d ever see her again. He was slumped in his seat, his head thrown back against the bullet-proof glass as if he no longer had the will to hold it up. And then — I’ve never seen anything so moving, so emotionally ravaging, in my life — he began to cry. I offered him my handkerchief but he motioned me away, great wet heaving sobs tearing at his lungs, the riveting blue eyes that had gazed with equanimity on the most heinous scenes of devastation known to civilized man reddened with a sorrow beyond despair. “Nina,” he choked, and buried his face in his hands.

You know the rest. The “tough” talks at Camp David (ostensibly over the question of the Berlin Wall), the Soviet premier’s postponement of Ike’s reciprocal visit till the spring, “when things are in bloom,” the eventual rescinding of the invitation altogether, and the virulent anti-Eisenhower speech Khrushchev delivered in the wake of the U-2 incident. Then there was Ike’s final year in office, his loss of animation, his heart troubles (heart troubles—could anything be more ironic?), the way in which he so rapidly and visibly aged, as if each moment of each day weighed on him like an eternity. And finally, our last picture of him: the affable, slightly foggy old duffer chasing a white ball across the links as if it were some part of himself he’d misplaced.

As for myself, I was rapidly demoted after the Khrushchev visit — it almost seemed as if I were an embarrassment to Ike, and in a way I guess I was, having seen him with his defenses down and his soul laid bare. I left the government a few months later and have pursued a rewarding academic career ever since, and am in fact looking forward to qualifying for tenure in the upcoming year. It has been a rich and satisfying life, one that has had its ups and downs, its years of quotidian existence and its few breathless moments at the summit of human history. Through it all, through all the myriad events I’ve witnessed, the loves I’ve known, the emotions stirred in my breast by the tragic events of our times, I can say with a sense of reverent gratitude and the deepest sincerity that nothing has so moved and tenderly astonished me as the joy, the sorrow, the epic sweep of the star-crossed love of Ike and Nina. I think of the Cold War, of nuclear proliferation, of Hungary, Korea, and the U-2 incident, and it all finally pales beside this: he loved her, and she loved him.

(1981)

* I choose not to name it, just as I decline to reveal my actual identity here, for obvious reasons.

† This is a pseudonym I’ve adopted as a concession to dramatic necessity in regard to the present narrative.

* “Hello” and “thank you.”

SORRY FUGU

“Limp radicchio.”

“Sorry fugu.”

“A blasphemy of baby lamb’s lettuce, frisée, endive.”

“A coulibiac made in hell.”

For six months he knew her only by her by-line — Willa Frank — and by the sting of her adjectives, the derisive thrust of her metaphors, the cold precision of her substantives. Regardless of the dish, despite the sincerity and ingenuity of the chef and the freshness or rarity of the ingredients, she seemed always to find it wanting. “The duck had been reduced to the state of the residue one might expect to find in the nether depths of a funerary urn”; “For all its rather testy piquancy, the orange sauce might just as well have been citron preserved in pickling brine”; “Paste and pasta. Are they synonymous? Hardly. But one wouldn’t have known the difference at Udolpho’s. The ‘fresh’ angel hair had all the taste and consistency of mucilage.”

Albert quailed before those caustic pronouncements, he shuddered and blanched and felt his stomach drop like a croquette into a vat of hot grease. On the morning she skewered Udolpho’s, he was sitting over a cup of reheated espresso and nibbling at a wedge of hazelnut dacquoise that had survived the previous night’s crush. As was his habit on Fridays, he’d retrieved the paper from the mat, got himself a bite, and then, with the reckless abandon of a diver plunging into an icy lake, turned to the “Dining Out” column. On alternate weeks, Willa Frank yielded to the paper’s other regular reviewer, a bighearted, appreciative woman by the name of Leonora Merganser, who approached every restaurant like a mother of eight feted by her children on Mother’s Day, and whose praise gushed forth in a breathless salivating stream that washed the reader out of his chair and up against the telephone stand, where he would dial frantically for a reservation. But this was Willa Frank’s week. And Willa Frank never liked anything.

With trembling fingers — it was only a matter of time before she slipped like a spy, like a murderess, into D’Angelo’s and filleted him like all the others — he smoothed out the paper and focused on the bold black letters of the headline:

UDOLPHO’S: TROGLODYTIC CUISINE

IN A CAVELIKE ATMOSPHERE

He read on, heart in mouth. She’d visited the restaurant on three occasions, once in the company of an abstract artist from Detroit, and twice with her regular companion, a young man so discerning she referred to him only as “The Palate.” On all three occasions, she’d been — sniff — disappointed. The turn-of-the-century gas lamps Udolpho’s grandfather had brought over from Naples hadn’t appealed to her (“so dark we joked that it was like dining among Neanderthals in the sub-basement of their cave”), nor had the open fire in the massive stone fireplace that dominated the room (“smoky, and stinking of incinerated chestnuts”). And then there was the food. When Albert got to the line about the pasta, he couldn’t go on. He folded the paper as carefully as he might have folded the winding sheet over Udolpho’s broken body and set it aside.

It was then that Marie stepped through the swinging doors to the kitchen, the wet cloth napkin she’d been using as a dishrag clutched in her hand. “Albert?” she gasped, darting an uneasy glance from his stricken face to the newspaper. “Is anything wrong? Did she—? Today?”

She assumed the worst, and now he corrected her in a drawl so lugubrious it might have been his expiring breath: “Udolpho’s.”

“Udolpho’s?” Relief flooded her voice, but almost immediately it gave way to disbelief and outrage. “Udolpho’s?” she repeated.

He shook his head sadly. For thirty years Udolpho’s had reigned supreme among West Side restaurants, a place impervious to fads and trends, never chic but steady — classy in a way no nouvelle mangerie with its pastel walls and Breuer chairs could ever hope to be. Cagney had eaten here, Durante, Roy Rogers, Anna Maria Alberghetti. It was a shrine, an institution.

Albert himself, a pudgy sorrowful boy of twelve, ridiculed for his flab and the great insatiable fist of his appetite, had experienced the grand epiphany of his life in one of Udolpho’s dark, smoky, and — for him, at least — forever exotic banquettes. Sampling the vermicelli with oil, garlic, olives, and forest mushrooms, the osso buco with the little twists of bow-tie pasta that drank up its buttery juices, he knew just as certainly as Alexander must have known he was born to conquer, that he, Albert D’Angelo, was born to eat. And that far from being something to be ashamed of, it was glorious, avocation and vocation both, the highest pinnacle to which he could aspire. Other boys had their Snider, their Mays, their Reese and Mantle, but for Albert the magical names were Pellaprat, Escoffier, Udolpho Melanzane.

Yes. And now Udolpho was nothing. Willa Frank had seen to that.

Marie was bent over the table now, reading, her piping girlish voice hot with indignation.

“Where does she come off, anyway?” Albert shrugged. Since he’d opened D’Angelo’s eighteen months ago the press had all but ignored him. Yes, he’d had a little paragraph in Barbed Wire, the alternative press weekly handed out on street corners by greasy characters with straight pins through their noses, but you could hardly count that. There was only one paper that really mattered — Willa Frank’s paper — and while word of mouth was all right, without a review in the paper, you were dead. Problem was, if Willa Frank wrote you up, you were dead anyway.

“Maybe you’ll get the other one,” Marie said suddenly. “What’s her name — the good one.”

Albert’s lips barely moved. “Leonora Merganser.”

“Well, you could.”

“I want Willa Frank,” he growled.

Marie’s brow lifted. She closed the paper and came to him, rocked back from his belly, and pecked a kiss to his beard. “You can’t be serious?”

Albert glanced bitterly around the restaurant, the simple pine tables, whitewashed walls, potted palms soft in the filtered morning light. “Leonora Merganser would faint over the Hamburger Hamlet on the corner, Long John Silver’s, anything. Where’s the challenge in that?”

“Challenge? But we don’t want a challenge, honey — we want business. Don’t we? I mean if we’re going to get married and all—”

Albert sat heavily, took a miserable sip of his stone-cold espresso. “I’m a great chef, aren’t I?” There was something in his tone that told her it wasn’t exactly a rhetorical question.

“Honey, baby,” she was in his lap now, fluffing his hair, peering into his ear, “of course you are. The best. The very best. But—”

“Willa Frank,” he rumbled. “Willa Frank. I want her.”

There are nights when it all comes together, when the monkfish is so fresh it flakes on the grill, when the pesto tastes like the wind through the pines and the party of eight gets their seven appetizers and six entrées in palettes of rising steam and delicate colors so perfect they might have been a single diner sitting down to a single dish. This night, however, was not such a night. This was a night when everything went wrong.

First of all, there was the aggravating fact that Eduardo — the Chilean waiter who’d learned, a la Chico Marx, to sprinkle superfluous “ahs” through his speech and thus pass for Italian — was late. This put Marie off her pace vis-à-vis the desserts, for which she was solely responsible, since she had to seat and serve the first half-dozen customers. Next, in rapid succession, Albert found that he was out of mesquite for the grill, sun-dried tomatoes for the fusilli with funghi, capers, black olives, and, yes, sun-dried tomatoes, and that the fresh cream for the frittata piemontese had mysteriously gone sour. And then, just when he’d managed to recover his equilibrium and was working in that translated state where mind and body are one, Roque went berserk.

Of the restaurant’s five employees — Marie, Eduardo, Torrey, who did day cleanup, Albert himself, and Roque — Roque operated on perhaps the most elemental level. He was the dishwasher. The Yucateco dishwasher. Whose responsibility it was to see that D’Angelo’s pink and gray sets of heavy Syracuse china were kept in constant circulation through the mid-evening dinner rush. On this particular night, however, Roque was slow to accept the challenge of that responsibility, scraping plates and wielding the nozzle of his supersprayer as if in a dream. And not only was he moving slowly, the dishes, with their spatters of red and white sauce and dribbles of grease piling up beside him like the Watts Towers, but he was muttering to himself. Darkly. In a dialect so arcane even Eduardo couldn’t fathom it.

When Albert questioned him — a bit too sharply, perhaps: he was overwrought himself — Roque exploded. All Albert had said was, “Roque — you all right?” But he might just as well have reviled his mother, his fourteen sisters, and his birthplace. Cursing, Roque danced back from the stainless-steel sink, tore the apron from his chest, and began scaling dishes against the wall. It took all of Albert’s two hundred twenty pounds, together with Eduardo’s one-eighty, to get Roque, who couldn’t have weighed more than one-twenty in hip boots, out the door and into the alley. Together they slammed the door on him — the door on which he continued to beat with a shoe for half an hour or more — while Marie took up the dishrag with a sigh.

A disaster. Pure, unalloyed, unmitigated. The night was a disaster.

Albert had just begun to catch up when Torrey slouched through the alley door and into the kitchen, her bony hand raised in greeting. Torrey was pale and shrunken, a nineteen-year-old with a red butch cut who spoke with the rising inflection and oblate vowels of the Valley Girl, born and bred. She wanted an advance on her salary.

“Momento, momento,” Albert said, flashing past her with a pan of béarnaise in one hand, a mayonnaise jar of vivid orange sea-urchin roe in the other. He liked to use his rudimentary Italian when he was cooking. It made him feel impregnable.

Meanwhile, Torrey shuffled halfheartedly across the floor and positioned herself behind the porthole in the “out” door, where, for lack of anything better to do, she could watch the customers eat, drink, smoke, and finger their pastry. The béarnaise was puddling up beautifully on a plate of grilled baby summer squash, the roe dolloped on a fillet of monkfish nestled snug in its cruet, and Albert was thinking of offering Torrey battle pay if she’d stay and wash dishes, when she let out a low whistle. This was no cab or encore whistle, but the sort of whistle that expresses surprise or shock — a “Holy cow!” sort of whistle. It stopped Albert cold. Something bad was about to happen, he knew it, just as surely as he knew that the tiny hairs rimming his bald spot had suddenly stiffened up like hackles.

“What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

Torrey turned to him, slow as an executioner. “I see you got Willa Frank out there tonight — everything going okay?”

The monkfish burst into flame, the béarnaise turned to water, Marie dropped two cups of coffee and a plate of homemade millefoglie.

No matter. In an instant, all three of them were pressed up against the little round window, as intent as torpedoers peering through a periscope. “Which one?” Albert hissed, his heart doing paradiddles.

“Over there?” Torrey said, making it a question. “With Jock — Jock Mc-Namee? The one with the blond wig?”

Albert looked, but he couldn’t see. “Where? Where?” he cried.

“There? In the corner?”

In the corner, in the corner. Albert was looking at a young woman, a girl, a blonde in a black cocktail dress and no brassiere, seated across from a hulking giant with a peroxide-streaked flattop. “Where?” he repeated.

Torrey pointed.

“The blonde?” He could feel Marie go slack beside him. “But that can’t be—” Words failed him. This was Willa Frank, doyenne of taste, grande dame of haute cuisine, ferreter out of the incorrect, the underachieved, arid the unfortunate? And this clod beside her, with the great smooth-working jaw and forearms like pillars, this was the possessor of the fussiest, pickiest, most sophisticated and fastidious palate in town? No, it was impossible.

“Like I know him, you know?” Torrey was saying. “Jock? Like from the Anti-Club and all that scene?”

But Albert wasn’t listening. He was watching her — Willa Frank — as transfixed as the tailorbird that dares look into the cobra’s eye. She was slim, pretty, eyes dark as a houri’s, a lot of jewelry — not at all what he’d expected. He’d pictured a veiny elegant woman in her fifties, starchy, patrician, from Boston or Newport or some such place. But wait, wait: Eduardo was just setting the plates down — she was the Florentine tripe, of course — a good dish, a dish he’d stand by any day, even a bad one like … but the Palate, what was he having? Albert strained forward, and he could feel Marie’s lost and limp hand feebly pressing his own. There: the veal piccata, yes, a very good dish, an outstanding dish. Yes. Yes.

Eduardo bowed gracefully away. The big man in the punk hairdo bent to his plate and sniffed. Willa Frank — blond, delicious, lethal — cut into the tripe, and raised the fork to her lips.

“She hated it. I know it. I know it.” Albert rocked back and forth in his chair, his face buried in his hands, the toque clinging to his brow like a carrion bird. It was past midnight, the restaurant was closed. He sat amidst the wreckage of the kitchen, the waste, the slop, the smell of congealed grease and dead spices, and his breath came in ragged sobbing gasps.

Marie got up to rub the back of his neck. Sweet, honey-complected Marie with her firm heavy arms and graceful wrists, the spill and generosity of her flesh — his consolation in a world of Willa Franks. “It’s okay,” she kept saying, over and over, her voice a soothing murmur, “it’s okay, it was good, it was.”

He’d failed and he knew it. Of all nights, why this one? Why couldn’t she have come when the structure was there, when he was on, when the dishwasher was sober, the cream fresh, and the mesquite knots piled high against the wall, when he could concentrate, for Christ’s sake? “She didn’t finish her tripe,” he said, disconsolate. “Or the grilled vegetables. I saw the plate.”

“She’ll be back,” Marie said. “Three visits minimum, right?”

Albert fished out a handkerchief and sorrowfully blew his nose. “Yeah,” he said, “three strikes and you’re out.” He twisted his neck to look up at her. “The Palate, Jock, whatever the jerk’s name is, he didn’t touch the veal. One bite maybe. Same with the pasta. Eduardo said the only thing he ate was the bread. And a bottle of beer.”

“What does he know,” Marie said. “Or her either.”

Albert shrugged. He pushed himself up wearily, impaled on the stake of his defeat, and helped himself to a glass of Orvieto and a plate of leftover sweetbreads. “Everything,” he said miserably, the meat like butter in his mouth, fragrant, nutty, inexpressibly right. He shrugged again. “Or nothing. What does it matter? Either way we get screwed.”

“And ‘Frank’? What kind of name is that, anyhow? German? Is that it?” Marie was on the attack now, pacing the linoleum like a field marshal probing for a weakness in the enemy lines, looking for a way in. “The Franks — weren’t they those barbarians in high school that sacked Rome? Or was it Paris?”

Willa Frank. The name was bitter on his tongue. Willa, Willa, Willa. It was a bony name, scant and lean, stripped of sensuality, the antithesis of the round, full-bodied Leonora. It spoke of a knotty Puritan toughness, a denying of the flesh, no compromise in the face of temptation. Willa. How could he ever hope to seduce a Willa? And Frank. That was even worse. A man’s name. Cold, forbidding, German, French. It was the name of a woman who wouldn’t complicate her task with notions of charity or the sparing of feelings. No, it was the name of a woman who would wield her adjectives like a club.

Stewing in these sour reflections, eating and no longer tasting, Albert was suddenly startled by a noise outside the alley door. He picked up a saucepan and stalked across the room — What next? Were they planning to rob him now too, was that it? — and flung open the door.

In the dim light of the alleyway stood two small dark men, the smaller of whom looked so much like Roque he might have been a clone. “Hello,” said the larger man, swiping a greasy Dodgers cap from his head. “I am called Raul, and this”—indicating his companion—“is called Fulgencio, cousin of Roque.” At the mention of his name, Fulgencio smiled. “Roque is gone to Albuquerque,” Raul continued, “and he is sorry. But he sends you his cousin, Fulgencio, to wash for you.”

Albert stood back from the door, and Fulgencio, grinning and nodding, mimed the motion of washing a plate as he stepped into the kitchen. Still grinning, still miming, he sambaed across the floor, lifted the supersprayer from its receptacle as he might have drawn a rapier from its scabbard, and started in on the dishes with a vigor that would have prostrated his mercurial cousin.

For a long moment Albert merely stood there watching, barely conscious of Marie at his back and Raul’s parting gesture as he gently shut the door. All of a sudden he felt redeemed, reborn, capable of anything. There was Fulgencio, a total stranger not two minutes ago, washing dishes as if he were born to it. And there was Marie, who’d stand by him if he had to cook cactus and lizard for the saints in the desert. And here he was himself, in all the vigor of his manhood, accomplished, knowledgeable, inspired, potentially one of the great culinary artists of his time. What was the matter with him? What was he crying about?

He’d wanted Willa Frank. All right: he’d gotten her. But on an off-night, the kind of night anyone could have. Out of mesquite. The cream gone sour, the dishwasher mad. Even Puck, even Soltner, couldn’t have contended with that.

She’d be back. Twice more. And he would be ready for her.

All that week, a cloud of anticipation hung over the restaurant. Albert outdid himself, redefining the bounds of his nouvelle Northern Italian cuisine with a dozen new creations, including a very nice black pasta with grilled shrimp, a pungent jugged hare, and an absolutely devastating meadowlark marinated in shallots, white wine, and mint. He worked like a man possessed, a man inspired. Each night he offered seven appetizers and six entrées, and each night they were different. He outdid himself, and outdid himself again.

Friday came and went. The morning paper found Leonora Merganser puffing some Greek place in North Hollywood, heralding spanakopita as if it had been invented yesterday and discovering evidence of divine intervention in the folds of a grape leaf. Fulgencio scrubbed dishes with a passion, Eduardo worked on his accent and threw out his chest, Marie’s desserts positively floated on air. And day by day, Albert rose to new heights.

It was on Tuesday of the following week — a quiet Tuesday, one of the quietest Albert could remember — that Willa Frank appeared again. There were only two other parties in the restaurant, a skeletal septuagenarian with a professorial air and his granddaughter — at least Albert hoped she was his granddaughter — and a Beverly Hills couple who’d been coming in once a week since the place opened.

Her presence was announced by Eduardo, who slammed into the kitchen with a drawn face and a shakily scrawled cocktail order. “She’s here,” he whispered, and the kitchen fell silent. Fulgencio paused, sprayer in hand. Marie looked up from a plate of tortes. Albert, who’d been putting the finishing touches to a dish of sautéed scallops al pesto for the professor and a breast of duck with wild mushrooms for his granddaughter, staggered back from the table as if he’d been shot. Dropping everything, he rushed to the porthole for a glimpse of her.

It was his moment of truth, the moment in which his courage very nearly failed him. She was stunning. Glowing. As perfect and unapproachable as the plucked and haughty girls who looked out at him from the covers of magazines at the supermarket, icily elegant in a clingy silk chemise the color of béchamel. How could he, Albert D’Angelo, for all his talent and greatness of heart, ever hope to touch her, to move such perfection, to pique such jaded taste buds?

Wounded, he looked to her companions. Beside her, grinning hugely, as hearty, handsome, and bland as ever, was the Palate — he could expect no help from that quarter. And then he turned his eyes on the couple they’d brought with them, looking for signs of sympathy. He looked in vain. They were middle-aged, silver-haired, dressed to the nines, thin and stringy in the way of those who exercise inflexible control over their appetites, about as sympathetic as vigilantes. Albert understood then that it was going to be an uphill battle. He turned back to the grill, girded himself in a clean apron, and awaited the worst.

Marie fixed the drinks — two martinis, a Glenlivet neat for Willa, and a beer for the Palate. For appetizers they ordered mozzarella di buffala marinara, the caponata D’Angelo, the octopus salad, and the veal medallions with onion marmalade. Albert put his soul into each dish, arranged and garnished the plates with all the patient care and shimmering inspiration of a Toulouse-Lautrec bent over a canvas, and watched, defeated, as each came back to the kitchen half eaten. And then came the entrées. They ordered a selection — five different dishes — and Albert, after delivering them up to Eduardo with a face of stone, pressed himself to the porthole like a voyeur.

Riveted, he watched as they sat back so that Eduardo could present the dishes. He waited, but nothing happened. They barely glanced at the food. And then, as if by signal, they began passing the plates around the table. He was stunned: what did they think this was — the Imperial Dinner at Chow Foo Luck’s? But then he understood: each dish had to suffer the scrutiny of the big man with the brutal jaw before they would deign to touch it. No one ate, no one spoke, no one lifted a glass of the Château Bellegrave, 1966, to his lips, until Jock had sniffed, finger-licked, and then gingerly tasted each of Albert’s creations. Willa sat rigid, her black eyes open wide, as the great-jawed, brush-headed giant leaned intently over the plate and rolled a bit of scallop or duck over his tongue. Finally, when all the dishes had circulated, the écrevisses Alberto came to rest, like a roulette ball, in front of the Palate. But he’d already snuffed it, already dirtied his fork in it. And now, with a grand gesture, he pushed the plate aside and called out in a hoarse voice for beer.

The next day was the blackest of Albert’s life. There were two strikes against him, and the third was coming down the pike. He didn’t know what to do. His dreams had been feverish, a nightmare of mincing truffles and reanimated pigs’ feet, and he awoke with the wildest combinations on his lips — chopped pickles and shad roe, an onion-cinnamon mousse, black-eyed peas vinaigrette. He even, half-seriously, drew up a fantasy menu, a list of dishes no one had ever tasted, not sheiks or presidents. La Cuisine des Espèces en Danger, he would call it. Breast of California condor aux chanterelles; snail darter à la meunière; medallions of panda alla campagnola. Marie laughed out loud when he presented her with the menu that afternoon—“I’ve invented a new cuisine!” he shouted — and for a moment, the pall lifted.

But just as quickly, it descended again. He knew what he had to do. He had to speak to her, his severest critic, through the medium of his food. He had to translate for her, awaken her with a kiss. But how? How could he even begin to rouse her from her slumber when that clod stood between them like a watchdog?

As it turned out, the answer was closer at hand than he could have imagined.

It was late the next afternoon — Thursday, the day before Willa Frank’s next hatchet job was due to appear in the paper — and Albert sat at a table in the back of the darkened restaurant, brooding over his menu. He was almost certain she’d be in for her final visit that night, and yet he still hadn’t a clue as to how he was going to redeem himself. For a long while he sat there in his misery, absently watching Torrey as she probed beneath the front tables with the wand of her vacuum. Behind him, in the kitchen, sauces were simmering, a veal loin roasting; Marie was baking bread and Fulgencio stacking wood. He must have watched Torrey for a full five minutes before he called out to her. “Torrey!” he shouted over the roar of the vacuum. “Torrey, shut that thing off a minute, will you?”

The roar died to a wheeze, then silence. Torrey looked up.

“This guy, what’s his name, Jock — what do you know about him?” He glanced down at the scrawled-over menu and then up again. “I mean, you don’t know what he likes to eat, by any chance, do you?”

Torrey shambled across the floor, scratching the stubble of her head. She was wearing a torn flannel shirt three sizes too big for her. There was a smear of grease under her left eye. It took her a moment, tongue caught in the corner of her mouth, her brow furrowed in deliberation. “Plain stuff, I guess,” she said finally, with a shrug of her shoulders. “Burned steak, potatoes with the skins on, boiled peas, and that — the kind of stuff his mother used to make. You know, like shanty Irish?”

Albert was busy that night — terrifically busy, the place packed — and when Willa Frank and her Palate sauntered in at nine-fifteen, he was ready for them. They had reservations (under an assumed name, of course — M. Cavil, party of two), and Eduardo was able to seat them immediately. In he came, breathless, the familiar phrase like a tocsin on his lips—“She’s here!”—and out he fluttered again, with the drinks: one Glenlivet neat, one beer. Albert never glanced up.

On the stove, however, was a smallish pot. And in the pot were three tough scarred potatoes, eyes and dirt-flecked skin intact, boiling furiously; in and amongst them, dancing in the roiling water, were the contents of a sixteen-ounce can of Mother Hubbard’s discount peas. Albert hummed to himself as he worked, searing chunks of grouper with shrimp, crab, and scallops in a big pan, chopping garlic and leeks, patting a scoop of foie gras into place atop a tournedos of beef. When, some twenty minutes later, a still-breathless Eduardo rocked through the door with their order, Albert took the yellow slip from him and tore it in two without giving it a second glance. Zero hour had arrived.

“Marie!” he called, “Marie, quick!” He put on his most frantic face for her, the face of a man clutching at a wisp of grass at the very edge of a precipice.

Marie went numb. She set down her cocktail shaker and wiped her hands on her apron. There was catastrophe in the air. “What is it?” she gasped.

He was out of sea-urchin roe. And fish fumet. And Willa Frank had ordered the fillet of grouper oursinade. There wasn’t a moment to lose — she had to rush over to the Edo Sushi House and borrow enough from Greg Takesue to last out the night. Albert had called ahead. It was okay. “Go, go,” he said, wringing his big pale hands.

For the briefest moment, she hesitated. “But that’s all the way across town — if it takes me an hour, I’ll be lucky.”

And now the matter-of-life-and-death look came into his eyes. “Go,” he said. “I’ll stall her.”

No sooner had the door slammed behind Marie, than Albert took Fulgencio by the arm. “I want you to take a break,” he shouted over the hiss of the sprayer. “Forty-five minutes. No, an hour.”

Fulgencio looked up at him out of the dark Aztecan slashes of his eyes. Then he broke into a broad grin. “No entiendo,” he said.

Albert mimed it for him. Then he pointed at the clock, and after a flurry of nodding back and forth, Fulgencio was gone. Whistling (“Core ‘ngrato,” one of his late mother’s favorites), Albert glided to the meat locker and extracted the hard-frozen lump of gray gristle and fat he’d purchased that afternoon at the local Safeway. Round steak, they called it, $2.39 a pound. He tore the thing from its plastic wrapping, selected his largest skillet, turned the heat up high beneath it, and unceremoniously dropped the frozen lump into the searing black depths of the pan.

Eduardo hustled in and out, no time to question the twin absences of Marie and Fulgencio. Out went the tournedos Rossini, the fillet of grouper oursinade, the veal loin rubbed with sage and coriander, the anguille alla veneziana, and the zuppa di datteri Alberto; in came the dirty plates, the congested forks, the wineglasses smeared with butter and lipstick. A great plume of smoke rose from the pan on the front burner. Albert went on whistling.

And then, on one of Eduardo’s mad dashes through the kitchen, Albert caught him by the arm. “Here,” he said, shoving a plate into his hand. “For the gentleman with Miss Frank.”

Eduardo stared bewildered at the plate in his hand. On it, arranged with all the finesse of a blue-plate special, lay three boiled potatoes, a splatter of reduced peas, and what could only be described as a plank of meat, stiff and flat as the chopping block, black as the bottom of the pan.

“Trust me,” Albert said, guiding the stunned waiter toward the door. “Oh, and here,” thrusting a bottle of ketchup into his hand, “serve it with this.”

Still, Albert didn’t yield to the temptation to go to the porthole. Instead, he turned the flame down low beneath his saucepans, smoothed back the hair at his temples, and began counting — as slowly as in a schoolyard game — to fifty.

He hadn’t reached twenty when Willa Frank, scintillating in a tomato-red Italian knit, burst through the door. Eduardo was right behind her, a martyred look on his face, his hands spread in supplication. Albert lifted his head, swelled his chest, and adjusted the great ball of his gut beneath the pristine field of his apron. He dismissed Eduardo with a flick of his hand, and turned to Willa Frank with the tight composed smile of a man running for office. “Excuse me,” she was saying, her voice toneless and shrill, as Eduardo ducked out the door, “but are you the chef here?”

He was still counting: twenty-eight, twenty-nine.

“Because I just wanted to tell you”—she was so wrought up she could barely go on—“I never, never in my life …”

“Shhhhh,” he said, pressing a finger to his lips. “It’s all right,” he murmured, his voice as soothing and deep as a backrub. Then he took her gently by the elbow and led her to a table he’d set up between the stove and chopping block. The table was draped with a snowy cloth, set with fine crystal, china, and sterling inherited from his mother. There was a single chair, a single napkin. “Sit,” he said.

She tore away from him. “I don’t want to sit,” she protested, her black eyes lit with suspicion. The knit dress clung to her like a leotard. Her heels clicked on the linoleum. “You know, don’t you?” she said, backing away from him. “You know who I am.”

Huge, ursine, serene, Albert moved with her as if they were dancing. He nodded.

“But why—?” He could see the appalling vision of that desecrated steak dancing before her eyes. “It’s, it’s like suicide.”

A saucepan had appeared in his hand. He was so close to her he could feel the grid of her dress through the thin yielding cloth of his apron. “Hush,” he purred, “don’t think about it. Don’t think at all. Here,” he said, lifting the cover from the pan, “smell this.”

She looked at him as if she didn’t know where she was. She gazed down into the steaming pan and then looked back up into his eyes. He saw the gentle, involuntary movement of her throat.

“Squid rings in aioli sauce,” he whispered. “Try one.”

Gently, never taking his eyes from her, he set the pan down on the table, plucked a ring from the sauce, and held it up before her face. Her lips — full, sensuous lips, he saw now, not at all the thin stingy flaps of skin he’d imagined — began to tremble. Then she tilted her chin ever so slightly, and her mouth dropped open. He fed her like a nestling.

First the squid: one, two, three pieces. Then a pan of lobster tortellini in a thick, buttery saffron sauce. She practically licked the sauce from his fingers. This time, when he asked her to sit, when he put his big hand on her elbow and guided her forward, she obeyed.

He glanced through the porthole and out into the dining room as he removed from the oven the little toast rounds with sun-dried tomatoes and baked Atascadero goat cheese. Jock’s head was down over his plate, the beer half gone, a great wedge of incinerated meat impaled on the tines of his fork. His massive jaw was working, his cheek distended as if with a plug of tobacco. “Here,” Albert murmured, turning to Willa Frank and laying his warm, redolent hand over her eyes, “a surprise.”

It was after she’d finished the taglierini alla pizzaiola, with its homemade fennel sausage and chopped tomatoes, and was experiencing the first rush of his glacé of grapefruit and Meyer lemon, that he asked about Jock. “Why him?” he said.

She scooped ice with a tiny silver spoon, licked a dollop of it from the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “I guess I don’t trust my own taste, that’s all.”

He lifted his eyebrows. He was leaning over her, solicitous, warm, the pan of Russian coulibiac of salmon, en brioche, with its rich sturgeon marrow and egg, held out in offering.

She watched his hands as he whisked the ice away and replaced it with the gleaming coulibiac. “I mean,” she said, pausing as he broke off a morsel and fed it into her mouth, “half thé time I just can’t seem to taste anything, really,” chewing now, her lovely throat dipping and rising as she swallowed, “and Jock — well, he hates everything. At least I know he’ll be consistent.” She took another bite, paused, considered. “Besides, to like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I’m wrong? What if it’s really no good?”

Albert hovered over her. Outside it had begun to rain. He could hear it sizzling like grease in the alley. “Try this,” he said, setting a plate of spiedino before her.

She was warm. He was warm. The oven glowed, the grill hissed, the scents of his creations rose about them, ambrosia and manna. “Um, good,” she said, unconsciously nibbling at prosciutto and mozzarella. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, her fingers dark with anchovy sauce, “I guess that’s why I like fugu.”

“Fugu?” Albert had heard of it somewhere. “Japanese, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “It’s a blowfish. They do it sushi or in little fried strips. But it’s the liver you want. It’s illegal here, did you know that?”

Albert didn’t know.

“It can kill you. Paralyze you. But if you just nibble, just a little bit, it numbs your lips, your teeth, your whole mouth.”

“What do you mean — like at the dentist’s?” Albert was horrified. Numbs your lips, your mouth? It was sacrilege. “That’s awful,” he said.

She looked sheepish, looked chastised.

He swung to the stove and then back again, yet another pan in his hand. “Just a bite more,” he coaxed.

She patted her stomach and gave him a great, wide, blooming smile. “Oh, no, no, Albert — can I call you Albert? — no, no, I couldn’t.”

“Here,” he said, “here,” his voice soft as a lover’s. “Open up.”

(1986)

WITHOUT A HERO

In the end, through luck and perseverance and an unwavering commitment to the spirit of glasnost, she did finally manage to get what she wanted. It was amazing. With two weeks to go on her six-month visa, she fell head-over-heels in love, got swept up in a whirlwind romance and found herself married — and to an American, no less. His name was Yusef Ozizmir, he was a naturalized citizen from a small town outside of Ankara, and he was production manager for a prosthetics firm based in Culver City. She called me late one night to give me the news and gloat a bit over her honeymoon in Las Vegas and her new apartment in Manhattan Beach that featured three bedrooms, vast closets and a sweet clean smell of the sea. Her voice was just as I’d remembered it: tiny, heavily accented and with the throaty arrhythmic scratch of sensuality that had awakened me in every fiber when I first heard it — the way she said “wodka” still aroused me even after all that had happened.

“I’m happy for you, Irina,” I said.

“Oh,” she gasped in her tiny voice that was made tinier by the uncertain connection, “that is very kind of you; I am very grateful. Yusef has made me very happy too, yes? He has given me a ring of twenty-four karats gold and a Lincoln automobile.”

There was a pause. I glanced across my apartment at the sagging bookshelves, the TV tuned to a dim romantic comedy from the black-and-white era, the darkened window beyond. Her voice became tinier still, contracting till it was barely audible, a hesitant little squeak of passion. “You know … I miss you, Casey,” she breathed. “I will always miss you too much.”

“Listen, Irina, I have to go …” I was trying to think of an excuse — the kitchen was on fire, my mother had been stricken with ptomaine and rushed to the hospital, my knives needed sharpening — but she cut me off.

“Yes, Casey, I know. You have to go. You must go. Always you go.”

“Listen,” I began, and then I caught myself. “See you,” I said.

“For a moment there was nothing. I listened to the cracks and pops of static. Finally her voice came back at me, the smallest voice in the world. “Yes,” she said. “See you.”

When I first saw her — when I laid eyes on her for the first time, that is — it was by prearrangement. She was in the baggage-claim area of the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, and I was there to pick her up. I was late — a failing of mine, I admit it — and anxious on several counts: about meeting her, missing her, about sleeping arrangements and dinner and a hundred other things, ranging from my total deficiency in Russian to my passing acquaintance with the greats of Russian literature and the fear that she would offer to buy my jeans with a fistful of rubles. I was jogging through the corridors, dodging bleary-eyed Sikhs, hearty Brits and circumspect salesmen from Japan and Korea, the big names — Solzhenitsyn, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy — running through my head like an incantation, when I spotted her.

There was no mistaking her. I had Rob Peterman’s description to go by — twenty-eight, blond, with a figure right out of the Bolshoi and a face that could kill — but I didn’t need it. She was the center of a vortex of activity, a cigarette in one hand, a plastic cup of vodka in the other, her things scattered about her in cyclonic disarray — newspapers, luggage, makeup, paper towels and tissues, a sweater, several purses, half-a-dozen stuffed animals and a Dodgers cap occupying the two rows of seats behind her. She was engaged in an animated discussion of perestroika, Lithuanian independence, the threat of nuclear war and the relative merits of the Jaguar XJS as opposed to the Mercedes 560 SEC with three well-lubricated businessmen in rumpled suits. The cigarette—“A Gauloise, of course; what else is there?”—described an arc in the air, the hopelessly out-of-date go-go boots did a mazurka on the carpet, the fringe of the baby-blue patent-leather jacket trembled and shook. I didn’t know what to do. I was sweating from my dash through the airport and I must have had that crazed, trapped-in-a-burning-barn look in my eyes.

“And do you know what I give you for that Mercedes?” she demanded of the shortest and most rumpled of the businessmen. “Eh?”

No response. All three men just stared at her, their mouths slightly agape, as if she’d just touched down from the far reaches of space.

“Nichevo.” A little laugh escaped her. “This is what means ‘nothing’ in Russia. Nichevo.”

I edged into her line of sight and made an extenuating gesture, describing a little circle of apology and lament with my hands and shirtsleeve arms. “Irina?” I asked.

She looked at me then, stopped dead in the middle of her next phrase and focused her milky blue — and ever so slightly exophthalmic — eyes on me. And then she smiled, allowing me my first take of her slim, sharp-toothed grin, and I felt a rush of warmth as the blood shot through me — a Russian smile, I thought, my first Russian smile. “Casey,” she said, and there was no interrogatory lift to it, no doubt. “Casey.” And then she turned away from her three interlocutors, dismissing them as if they’d never existed, and fell into my arms.

There was no shame in wanting things, and Irina wanted plenty. “Where I come from,” she would say in her tiny halting breathy voice, “we do not have.”

She revealed this to me for the first time in the car on the way back from the airport. Her eyes were shining, the Dodgers cap (a gift from one of the businessmen) rode the crown of her head like a victory wreath, and she gaily sang out the names and citations of the cars we passed on the freeway: “Corvette! Z-car! BMW 750!” I tried to keep my eyes on the road, but couldn’t help stealing a glance at her from time to time.

Rob Peterman had been generous in his description, I could see that now. In the rush of excitement at the airport I saw only the exotic Irina, Rob Peterman’s ideal made flesh, but as I began to study her I saw that she was no beauty — interesting, certainly, and pretty to a degree, but a far cry from the hyperborean goddess I’d been led to expect. But isn’t that the way it always is?

“Is that not I. Magnin?” she cried as we pulled off the freeway. And then she turned to me and gave me that smile again, purring, cooing. “Oh, Casey, this is so — how do I say it? — so very much exciting to me.”

There was the bulge of her eyes, too much forehead, the drawn mouth and sharp little teeth, but she fit her jeans as if they’d been tailored for her, and there was her hair, and her smile too. To a man three months divorced, as I then was, she looked good — better than good: I forgot the ideal and tumbled into the actual. “I’ll take you there tomorrow,” I said, “and you can run wild through the store.” She was beaming at me, worshiping me with her eyes. “Tonight,” I said, letting my voice trail off a bit so as not to betray my eagerness, “tonight I thought we’d just have a quiet dinner — I mean, that is, if you’re not too-tired—”

Two weeks earlier Rob Peterman had called me from Georgetown, where he was one of the principal buttresses of the International Relations Department at the university. He’d just come back from a six-week lecture tour of Russia and he had some good news for me — better, even: he’d brought back a little gift for me.

I’d known Rob since college. We were fraternity brothers, and we’d had some wild times. We’d kept in touch ever since. “Gift?”

“Let me put it to you this way, Case,” he said. “There are a lot of university students in Moscow, thousands upon thousands of them, and a high percentage of them are young women from the provinces who’ll do anything to stay in the big city. Or to travel, for that matter.”

He had my attention, I had to admit it.

“You’d be surprised how many of them tend to gather round the Intourist bars and hotels, and how polished and intelligent they are, not to mention beautiful — you know, the Ukrainian princess, the Georgian fleshpot, the exotic long-limbed Slav…”

“Yes? And so?”

“Her name’s Irina, Case,” he said, “and she’ll be in L.A. next week, TWA flight number eight nine five, arriving from Paris, where she connects from Moscow. Irina Sudeikina. I, uh, met her while I was over there, and she needs attachments.” He lowered his voice. “If Sarah found out about her she’d take me to the vet and have me fixed, know what I mean?”

“What does she look like?”

“Who, Irina?” And then he gave me his generous description, which ran to twelve paragraphs and fanned the flames of my anticipation until I was a fireball of need, greed, hope and lust.

“Okay,” I said finally, “okay, I hear you. What flight did you say she was on?”

And so there we were, in the car, driving up Pico to my apartment, my question about dinner, with all its loaded implications, hanging in the air between us. I’d pulled out the sofa bed in the back bedroom, stuck a pole lamp in the corner, tidied up a bit. She hadn’t said anything about a hotel, and I hadn’t asked. I glanced at the road ahead, and then back at her. “You’re tired, aren’t you?” I said.

“Do you not live in Beverly Hills, Casey?” she asked.

“Century City,” I said. “It borders on Beverly Hills.”

“In a mansion?”

“An apartment. It’s nice. Plenty of room.”

She shifted the Dodgers cap so that the brim fell over the crown of her sun-struck hair. “Oh, I have slept on the airplane,” she said, turning her smile up a notch. “I am not tired. I am not tired at all.”

As it turned out, Irina was to be my houseguest for the next two months. She settled into the back room like a Bedouin settling into a desert outpost, and within a week her things were everywhere, ubiquitous, from the stuffed panda perched atop the TV to the sweat socks beneath the kitchen table and the Harlequin romances sprouting up from the carpet like toadstools. She took a free, communistic approach to my things as well, thinking nothing of scattering my classic Coltrane albums across the couch or breezing down to the Beverly Center on my eight-hundred-dollar Bianchi all-terrain bike, without reference to lock or chain (where it was promptly stolen), not to mention using the telephone as if it had been provided by the state for the convenience of apartment dwellers and their guests. Slovenly, indolent, nearly inert, she was the end product of three generations of the workers’ paradise, that vast dark crumbling empire in which ambition and initiative counted for nothing. Do I sound bitter? I am bitter. But I didn’t know all this back then, and if I had known, I wouldn’t have cared. All I knew was Irina’s smile and her hair and the proximity of her flesh; all I knew was that she was in the bedroom, unpacking and dressing for dinner.

I took her to a sushi place on Wilshire, thinking to impress her with my savoir-faire and internationalism, but she surprised me not only in being an adept at ebi, unagi and katsuo, but by ordering in flawless Japanese to boot. She was wearing a low-cut minidress made of some shiny brittle material, she’d drawn her hair back severely and knotted it up over her head in a big puffy bun, and she’d put some effort into her makeup. The sushi chef was all over her, chattering away in Japanese, fashioning whimsical creations of radish and carrot for her, rolling out his rare stock of fugu, the Japanese blowfish. I’d been a regular at the restaurant for two years at least, and he’d never looked at me twice. “Uh, Irina,” I said, as the chef slouched reluctantly off to make a scallop roll for the couple beside me, “where did you learn your Japanese? I mean, I’m impressed.”

She paused, a sliver of Norwegian salmon tucked neatly between her lips, patted her mouth and gasped, “Oh, this is nothing. I have spent six months in Japan in 1986.”

I was surprised. “They — the government, I mean, the Russian government — they let you travel then?”

She gave me a wink. “I am at that time a student of languages at Moscow State University, Casey … am I not then to learn these languages by visiting the countries in which they are spoken?” She turned back to her plate, plucked a morsel from some creation the chef had set before us. “Besides,” she said, speaking to the plate in her tiny voice, “there is a man I know in Moscow and he is able to arrange things — even difficult things.”

I had a hundred questions for her — about life behind the iron curtain, about Japan, about her girlhood and college and the mysterious benefactor in Moscow — but I focused instead on my sake and a slippery bit of maguro that kept eluding my chopsticks, and thought only of getting in the car and driving home with her.

I was a little tense on the way back — the first-date jitters, the sort of thing every male goes through from adolescence to the grave: will she or won’t she? — and I couldn’t think of much to say. It didn’t really matter. Irina was oblivious, lit with sake and three big pint-and-a-half bottles of Asahi, waving her cigarette, crossing and uncrossing her legs and rolling the exotic Anglo-Saxon and Latinate phrases over her tongue with real relish. How nice it was here in America, she thought, how sympathetic, and what a nice car I had, but wouldn’t I prefer a sportier model? I made a lot of money, didn’t I? — she could tell because I was so generous — and wasn’t it nice to have Japanese food, something you could find in one place only in Moscow, and then only if you were an apparatchik?

At home we had an after-dinner drink in the living room — Grand Marnier, twenty-six dollars the fifth; she filled the snifter to the top — while Coltrane serenaded us with “All or Nothing at All.” We talked about little things, inconsequential things, and she became progressively more animated as the level fell in her glass. And then, without a word of explanation — hello, goodbye, good night and thank you for dinner, nothing — she stood, refilled her glass and disappeared into the bedroom.

I was devastated. So this is it, I thought bitterly, this is my passionate Russian experience — a hundred and twenty bucks for sushi, half a bottle of Grand Marnier and a rush-hour schlep to the airport and back. I sat there, a little sick in the stomach, and listened to the sad expiring click of the turntable as the record ended and the machine shut itself down.

With all she’d had to drink, with the time change and the long flight from Moscow, I figured she’d probably hit the bed in a cold faint, but I was wrong. Just as I was about to give it up, heave myself out of the chair and tumble into my own comfortless bed, she appeared in the doorway. “Casey,” she murmured, her voice rich and low, and in the muted light I could see that she was wearing something silky and diaphanous — a teddy, a Russian teddy. “Casey,” she crooned, “I cannot seem to sleep.”

It was about a week later that she first asked me if I knew Akhmatova. I did know her, but not personally. She was dimmer to me even than Pushkin or Lermontov, a fading memory out of a drowsy classroom.

“We studied her in college,” I said lamely. “After she died — in the sixties, right? It was a survey course in Russian literature. In translation, I mean.”

Irina was sitting cross-legged on the couch in a litter of newspapers and magazines. She was wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of panties, and I’d just watched in fascination as she applied a glistening coat of neon-pink polish to her toenails. She looked up at me a moment and narrowed her pale-blue eyes. Then she closed them and began to recite:

”FROM THE YEAR NINETEEN-FORTY

AS FROM A HIGH TOWER I LEAN,

ONCE MORE BIDDING GOODBYE

TO WHAT I LONG AGO FORSOOK,

AS THOUGH I HAVE CROSSED MYSELF

AND AM GOING DOWN UNDER DARK

VAULTS.

“It is from Akhmatova’s great work, ‘Poem Without a Hero.’ Is it not sad and beautiful?”

I looked at her toenails shimmering in the light of the morning; I looked at her bare legs, her face, her eyes. We’d been out every night — I’d taken her to Chinatown, Disneyland, the Music Center and Malibu pier — and the glow of it was on me. “Yes,” I said.

“This is a great work about dying for love, Casey, about a poet who kills himself because his lover will not have him.” She shut her eyes again. “‘For one moment of peace I would give the peace of the tomb.’ “She let the moment hang, mesmeric, motes of dust floating in a shaft of light through the window, the bird-of-paradise gilded with sun, the traffic quiet on the street. And then she was looking at me, soft and shrewd at once. “Tell me, Casey, where does one find such a hero today? Where does one find a man who will die for love?”

The next day was the day she took my bike to the Beverly Center and we had our first falling-out.

I’d come home late from work — there was a problem with the new person we’d hired, the usual semiliteracy and incompetence — and the place was a mess. No: actually, “mess” didn’t do it justice. The apartment looked as if a troop of baboons had been locked inside it for a week. Every record I owned was out of its jacket and collecting dust; my books were scattered throughout the living room, spread open flat like crippled things; there were clothes and sheets and pillows wadded about; and every horizontal surface was inundated with a farrago of take-out food and crumpled wrappers: Colonel Sanders, Chow Foo Luck, McDonald’s, Arby’s, Taco Bell. She was on the phone in the back room — long-distance to Russia — and she hadn’t changed out of the T-shirt she’d been wearing the previous morning. She said something in Russian, and then I heard her say, “Yes, and my American boyfriend he is so very wealthy—”

“Irina?”

“I must go now. Do svidaniya.”

I stepped into the bedroom and she flew across the room to fling herself into my arms, already sobbing, sobbing in midair. I was disconcerted. “What’s the matter?” I said, clutching her hopelessly. I had a sudden intimation that she was leaving me, that she was going on to visit Chicago and New Orleans and New York, and I felt a sinkhole of loss open up inside me. “Are you — is everything all right?”

Her breath was hot on my throat. She began to kiss me there, over and over, till I took hold of her shoulders and forced her to look me in the eye. “Irina, tell me: what is it?”

“Oh, Casey,” she gasped, and her voice was so diminished I could barely hear her. “I have been so stupid. Even in Russia we must lock up our things, I know, but I have never dreamed that here, where you have so much—”

And so I discovered that my eight-hundred-dollar bicycle was no more, just as I was to learn that she’d sheared the blades off the Cuisinart attempting to dice a whole pineapple and that half my records had gouges in them and that my new white Ci Siamo jacket was stained with lipstick or cranberry juice or what might have been blood for all I knew.

I lost my sense of humor, my forbearance, my graciousness, my cool. We had a scene. Accusations flew. I didn’t care about her, she shrieked; things meant more to me than she did. “Things!” I snorted. “And who spends half her time at Robinson’s and Saks and the May Company? Who calls Russia as if God Himself would come down from heaven and pay the bills? Who hasn’t offered to pay a penny of anything, not even once?”

Her hair hung wild in her face. Strands of it adhered to the sudden moisture that glistened on her cheekbones. “You do not care for me,” she said in her tiniest voice. “I am only for you a momentary pleasure.”

I had nothing more to say. I stood there fuming as she fussed round the room, drawing on her jeans and boots, shrugging into the baby-blue patent-leather jacket and tamping out a cigarette in an abandoned coffee mug. She gave me a look — a look of contempt, anger, sorrow — and then she snatched up her purse and slammed out the door.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept listening for her key in the lock, kept picturing her shouldering her way through the punks and beggars on the boulevard and wondering if she had friends to go to. She had some money, I knew that, but she hoarded it like a capitalist, and though she knew all the brand names, she bought nothing. I saw the absurd go-go boots, the fringed jacket, the keen sexy spring in her walk that belied her phlegmatic Russian nature, and half-a-dozen times I got up to look for her and then thought better of it. In the morning, when I got up for work, the apartment was desolate.

I called home sporadically throughout the day, but there was no answer. I was angry, hurt, sick with worry. Finally, around four, she picked up the phone. “It is Irina,” she said, her voice tired and small.

“It’s me, Casey.”

No response.

“Irina? Are you all right?”

A pause. “I am very well, thank you.”

I wanted to ask where she’d spent the night, wanted to know and possess her and make demands, but I faltered in the presence of that quavering whispery voice. “Irina, listen, about last night … I just want to say I’m sorry.”

“That is no problem,” she said. And then, after a pause, “I leave you fifty dollars, Casey, on the table in the kitchen.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am going now, Casey. I know when I am not wanted.”

“No, no — I didn’t mean … I mean I was mad, I was angry, that was all. You’re wanted. You are.” I was pleading with her and even as I pleaded I could hear that I’d subconsciously picked up something of her diction, clipping my phrases in a too-formal way, a Russian way. “Listen, just wait there a minute, will you? I’m on my way home from work. I’ll take you wherever you want to go — you want to go to the airport? The bus? Whatever you want.”

Nothing.

“Irina?”

The smallest voice: “I will wait.”

I took her out to Harry’s that night for Italian food, and she was radiant, beaming, almost giddy — she couldn’t stop grinning at me, and everything I said was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She cut her veal into neat little strips, chattered at the waiter in a breathy fluid Italian, tossed off one glass of Chianti after another, all the while pecking kisses at me and entwining her fingers with mine as if we were sixteen-year-olds at the mall. I didn’t mind. This was our reconciliation, and the smoke of sensuality hung over the table.

She leaned toward me over dessert — millefoglie with a cappuccino and Grand Marnier — and gave me the full benefit of her swollen eyes. The lights were low. Her voice was a whisper. I expected her to say, “Do you not want to take me home to bed now?” but she surprised me. With a randy look, she cleared her throat and said, “Casey, I have been wondering”—pause—“do you think I should put my money in CD or mutual fund?”

I couldn’t have been more stunned if she’d asked me who played third base for the Dodgers. “What?”

“The Magellan has performed best, has it not?” she whispered, and the talk of money seemed to make her voice sultrier still. “But then the founder is retiring, is this not so?”

A sudden anger came over me. Was she hustling me, was that it? She had money to invest and yet accepted her room and meals and all the rest from me as if it were her divine right? I stared down into my cappuccino and muttered, “Hell, I don’t know. What are you asking me for?”

She patted my hand and then said in her fading slip of a voice, “Perhaps this is not the time.” Her mouth made a little moue of contrition. And then, almost immediately, she brightened again. “It is early yet, Casey,” she said, quaffing her Grand Marnier and rising. “Do you not want to take me to the Odessa?”

The Odessa was a club in the Fairfax district where Russian emigres of all ages would gather to sit at long cafeteria-style tables and listen to schmaltzy singers and third-rate comedians. They drank water glasses of warm Coke and vodka — the Coke in the left hand, vodka in the right, alternating swigs — and they sang along with and got up from the table and careened round the room to the frenetic Tatar strains of the orchestra. We stayed past closing, danced till we were soaked in sweat and drank enough vodka to fuel a 747. In the course of the evening we toasted Gorbachev, Misha Baryshnikov, the girls of Tbilisi, Leningrad and Murmansk, and drank the health of everyone in the room, individually, at least three times. Irina passed out in the car on the way home, and the night ended after she vomited gloriously in the potted ficus and I helped her to bed as if she were an invalid.

I felt queasy myself the next morning and called in sick at the office. When I finally got out of bed, around noon, Irina’s door was still closed. I was brewing coffee when she slumped through the kitchen door and fell into a chair. She was wearing a rumpled housecoat and she looked as if she’d been buried and dug up again.

“Me too,” I said, and I put both hands to my temples.

She said nothing, but accepted the coffee I poured for her. After a moment she pointed out the window to where one of my neighbors was letting her dog nose about in the shrubs that rimmed our little patch of lawn. “Do you see that dog, Casey?” she asked.

I nodded.

“It is a very lucky dog.”

“Lucky?”

“Yes,” she said, slow and lethargic, drawing it out. “It is a dog that has never tasted wodka.”

I laughed, but my eyes felt as if they were being sucked into my head and the coffee set my insides churning.

And then she took me by surprise again. Outside, the dog had disappeared, jerked rudely away at the end of a leash. The coffee machine dripped coffee. Someone gunned an engine two blocks away. “Casey,” she said, utterly composed, utterly serious, and she looked deep into my eyes. “Do you not want to marry me?”

The second blowup came at the end of the month, when the phone bill arrived. Four hundred twenty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents. I recognized a few calls — my lawyer’s number, Rob Peterman’s, a drunken cri de coeur I’d made to an old flame (now married) in Santa Barbara. But the rest were long-distance overseas — to Moscow, Novgorod, London, Paris, Milan. I was outraged. I was in shock. Why should I be responsible for her bills? I did not want to marry her, as I’d explained to her the morning after the Odessa. I told her I’d just been divorced and was leery of new attachments, which was true. I told her I still had feelings for my wife, which was also true (of course, those feelings were exclusively antipathetic, but I didn’t mention that). Irina had only stared at me, and then she got up from the kitchen table and went into her room, shutting the door firmly behind her.

But now, now she was out somewhere — no doubt looking at popcorn makers or water-purifying systems at some department store — the house was in a shambles, I hadn’t even loosened my tie yet and the phone bill was sending shock waves through me. I’d just poured a drink when I heard her key in the door; she came in beaming, oblivious, in a rustle of shopping bags and cheap trinkets, and I was all over her. “Don’t you know what this means?” I shouted. “Don’t you know that the telephone isn’t free in this society, that somebody has to pay for it? That I have to pay for it?”

She gave me a hard cold look. Her eyes narrowed; her chin trembled. “I will pay it,” she said, “if that is how you feel.”

“How I feel?” I shouted. “How I feel? Everybody pays their way in life, that’s how I feel. That’s the way society works, like it or not. Maybe it’s different in the workers’ paradise, I don’t know, but over here you play by the rules.”

She had nothing to say to that — she just held me with her contemptuous look, as if I were the one being unreasonable, and in that moment she reminded me of Julie, my ex-wife, as if she were in league with her, as if she were her double, and I felt bitter and disgusted to the core. I dropped the bill on the coffee table and stalked out the door.

When I got home from work the next day, the phone bill was still there, but there were five pristine one-hundred-dollar bills laid out beside it like a poker hand. Irina was in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to say to her. Suddenly I felt ashamed of myself.

I drifted into the room and draped my sportcoat over the back of one of the chairs and went to the refrigerator for a glass of orange juice. “Hello, Casey,” she said, glancing up from her magazine. It was one of those women’s magazines, thick as a phone book.

“Hi,” I said. And then, after an interval during which the level of the orange juice mounted in the glass and I gazed numbly out the window on a blur of green, I turned to her. “Irina,” I murmured, and my voice seemed to be caught in my throat, “I want to say thanks for the phone bill — the money, I mean.”

She looked up at me and shrugged. “It is nothing,” she said. “I have a job now.”

“A job?”

And there was her smile, the sharp little teeth. “Da,” she said. “I have met a man at the Odessa when I go for tea last Thursday? Do you remember I told you? His name is Zhenya and he has offered me a job.”

“Great,” I said. “Terrific. We should celebrate.” I lifted my glass as if it contained Perrier-Jouët. “What kind of work?”

She looked down at her magazine and then back up again, holding my eyes. “Escort service.”

I thought I hadn’t heard her right. “What? What are you saying?”

“It is an escort service, Casey. Zhenya says the men who come here for important business — in the movies, banking, real estate — they will like me. He says I am very beautiful.”

I was stunned. I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. “You can’t be serious?” My voice was pitched high, a yelp. “Irina, this is”—I couldn’t find the words—“this is not right, it’s not legitimate. It’s, it’s prostitution, don’t you know that?”

She was studying me, her shrewd eyes, the little nugget of her face. She sighed, closed the magazine and rose from her seat. “It is not a problem,” she said finally. “If I do not like them I will not sleep with them.”

And what about me? I wanted to say. What about Disneyland and Zuma Beach and all the rest of it? Instead I turned on her. “You’re crazy,” I spat. “Nuts. Don’t you know what you’re getting into?”

Her eyes hadn’t left mine, not for a second. She was a foot away from me. I could smell her perfume — French, four hundred dollars the ounce. She shrugged and then stretched her arms so that her breasts rose tight against her chest. “What am I to do,” she said in her smallest voice, so languid and sad. “I have nothing, and you will not marry me.”

That was the end for us, and we both knew it.

I took her out to dinner that night, but it was a requiem, an interment. She stared off into vacancy. Neither of us had much to say. When we got home I saw her face illuminated for an instant as she bent to switch on the lamp, and I felt something stir in me, but I killed it. We went to our separate rooms and to our separate beds.

In the morning, I sat over a cup of lukewarm coffee and watched her pack. She looked sweet and sad, and she moved as if she were fighting an invisible current, her hair streaming, imaginary fish hanging in the rafters. I didn’t know if the escort-service business was a bluff or not, didn’t know how naive — or how calculating — she was, but I felt that a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Now that it was over, I began to see her in a different light, a softer light, and a sliver of guilt began to stab at me. “Look, Irina,” I said as she struggled to force her suitcase shut, “I’m sorry. I really am.”

She threw her hair back with a jerk of her chin, shrugged into the baby-blue patent-leather jacket.

“Irina, look at me—”

She wouldn’t look. She leaned over to snap the latches on her suitcase. “This is no poem, Irina,” I said. “This is life.”

She swung round so suddenly I flinched. “I am the one, Casey,” she said, and her eyes leapt at me. “I am the one who can die for love.”

All the bitterness came back to me in that instant, all the hurt and guilt. Zhenya, Japan, the mysterious benefactor in Moscow, Rob Peterman and how many others? This was free enterprise, this was trade and barter and buying and selling — and where was the love in that? Worse yet: where was the love in me?

I was hard, a rock, granite. “Then die for it,” I said.

The phrase hung between us like a curtain. A car moved up the street. I could hear the steady drip-drip-drip of the kitchen tap. And then she bowed her head, as if accepting a blow, and bent for her suitcases. I was paralyzed. I was dead. I watched her struggle with her things, watched her fight the door, and then, as the sudden light gave way to darkness, I watched the door swing shut.

(1990)

HEART OF A CHAMPION

We scan the cornfields and the wheatfields winking gold and goldbrown and yellowbrown in the midday sun, on up the grassy slope to the barn redder than red against the sky bluer than blue, across the smooth stretch of the barnyard with its pecking chickens, and then right on up to the screen door at the back of the house. The door swings open, a black hole in the sun, and Timmy emerges with his corn-silk hair, corn-fed face. He is dressed in crisp overalls, striped T-shirt, stubby blue Keds. There’d have to be a breeze — and we’re not disappointed — his clean fine cup-cut hair waves and settles as he scuffs across the barnyard and out to the edge of the field. The boy stops there to gaze out over the nodding wheat, eyes unsquinted despite the sun, and blue as tinted lenses. Then he brings three fingers to his lips in a neat triangle and whistles long and low, sloping up sharp to cut off at the peak. A moment passes: he whistles again. And then we see it — way out there at the far corner of the field — the ripple, the dashing furrow, the blur of the streaking dog, white chest, flashing feet.

They’re in the woods now. The boy whistling, hands in pockets, kicking along with his short baby-fat strides; the dog beside him wagging the white tip of her tail like an all-clear flag. They pass beneath an arching old black-barked oak. It creaks. And suddenly begins to fling itself down on them: immense, brutal: a panzer strike. The boy’s eyes startle and then there’s a blur, a smart snout clutching his pantleg, the thunderblast of the trunk, the dust and spinning leaves. “Golly, Lassie … I didn’t even see it,” says the boy sitting safe in a mound of moss. The collie looks up at him (the svelte snout, the deep gold logician’s eyes), and laps at his face.

And now they’re down by the river. The water is brown with angry suppurations, spiked with branches, fence posts, tires and logs. It rushes like the sides of boxcars — and chews deep and insidious at the bank under Timmy’s feet. The roar is like a jetport: little wonder he can’t hear the dog’s warning bark. We watch the crack appear, widen to a ditch; then the halves separating (snatch of red earth, writhe of worm), the poise and pitch, and Timmy crashing down with it. Just a flash — but already he’s way downstream, his head like a plastic jug, dashed and bobbed, spinning toward the nasty mouth of the falls. But there’s the dog — fast as a struck match — bursting along the bank all white and gold melded in motion, hair sleeked with the wind of it, legs beating time to the panting score … Yet what can she hope to do? — the current surges on, lengths ahead, sure bet to win the race to the falls. Timmy sweeps closer, sweeps closer, the falls loud now as a hundred timpani, the war drums of the Sioux, Africa gone bloodlust mad! The dog strains, lashing over the wet earth like a whipcrack; strains every last ganglion and dendrite until finally she draws abreast of him. Then she’s in the air, the foaming yellow water. Her paws churning like pistons, whiskers chuffing with the exertion — oh the roar! — and there, she’s got him, her sure jaws clamping down on the shirt collar, her eyes fixed on the slip of rock at the falls’ edge. Our blood races, organs palpitate. The black brink of the falls, the white paws digging at the rock — and then they’re safe. The collie sniffs at Timmy’s inert little form, nudges his side until she manages to roll him over. Then clears his tongue and begins mouth-to-mouth.

Night: the barnyard still, a bulb burning over the screen door. Inside, the family sit at dinner, the table heaped with pork chops, mashed potatoes, applesauce and peas, a pitcher of clean white milk. Home-baked bread. Mom and Dad, their faces sexless, bland, perpetually good-humored and sympathetic, poise stiff-backed, forks in midswoop, while Timmy tells his story: “So then Lassie grabbed me by the collar and golly I musta blanked out cause I don’t remember anything more till I woke up on the rock—”

“Well I’ll be,” says Mom.

“You’re lucky you’ve got such a good dog, son,” says Dad, gazing down at the collie where she lies patiently, snout over paw, tail wapping the floor. She is combed and washed and fluffed, her lashes mascaraed and curled, her chest and paws white as dishsoap. She looks up humbly. But then her ears leap, her neck jerks round — and she’s up at the door, head cocked, alert. A high yipping yowl like a stuttering fire whistle shudders through the room. And then another. The dog whines.

“Darn,” says Dad. “I thought we were rid of those coyotes — next thing they’ll be after the chickens again.”

The moon blanches the yard, leans black shadows on the trees, the barn. Upstairs in the house, Timmy lies sleeping in the pale light, his hair fastidiously mussed, his breathing gentle. The collie lies on the throw rug beside the bed. We see that her eyes are open. Suddenly she rises and slips to the window, silent as a shadow. And looks down the long elegant snout to the barnyard below, where the coyote slinks from shade to shade, a limp pullet dangling from his jaws. He is stunted, scabious, syphilitic, his forepaw trap-twisted, his eyes running. The collie whimpers softly from behind the window. And the coyote stops in mid-trot, frozen in a cold shard of light, ears high on his head. Then drops the chicken at his feet, leers up at the window and begins a soft, crooning, sad-faced song.

The screen door slaps behind Timmy as he bolts from the house, Lassie at his heels. Mom’s head emerges on the rebound. “Timmy!” (He stops as if jerked by a rope, turns to face her.) “You be home before lunch, hear?”

“Sure, Mom,” he says, already spinning off, the dog by his side. We get a close-up of Mom’s face: she is smiling a benevolent boys-will-be-boys smile. Her teeth are perfect.

In the woods Timmy steps on a rattler and the dog bites its head off. “Gosh,” he says. “Good girl, Lassie.” Then he stumbles and slips over an embankment, rolls down the brushy incline and over a sudden precipice, whirling out into the breathtaking blue space like a sky diver. He thumps down on a narrow ledge twenty feet below. And immediately scrambles to his feet, peering timorously down the sheer wall to the heap of bleached bone at its base. Small stones break loose, shoot out like asteroids. Dirt-slides begin. But Lassie yarps reassuringly from above, sprints back to the barn for a winch and cable, hoists the boy to safety.

On their way back for lunch Timmy leads them through a still and leaf-darkened copse. We remark how odd it is that the birds and crickets have left off their cheeping, how puzzling that the background music has begun to rumble so. Suddenly, round a bend in the path before them, the coyote appears. Nose to the ground, intent, unaware of them. But all at once he jerks to a halt, shudders like an epileptic, the hackles rising, tail dipping between his legs. The collie too stops short, just yards away, her chest proud and shaggy and white. The coyote cowers, bunches like a cat, glares at them. Timmy’s face sags with alarm. The coyote lifts his. lip. But then, instead of leaping at her adversary’s throat, the collie prances up and stretches her nose out to him, her eyes soft as a leading lady’s, round as a doe’s. She’s balsamed and perfumed; her full chest tapers a lovely S to her sleek haunches and sculpted legs. He is puny, runted, half her size, his coat like a discarded doormat. She circles him now, sniffing. She whimpers, he growls: throaty and tough, the bad guy. And stands stiff while she licks at his whiskers, noses at his rear, the bald black scrotum. Timmy is horror-struck. Then, the music sweeping off in birdtrills of flute and harpstring, the coyote slips round behind, throat thrown back, black lips tight with anticipation.

“What was she doing, Dad?” Timmy asks over his milk and sandwich. “The sky was blue today, son,” he says.

“But she had him trapped, Dad — they were stuck together end to end and I thought we had that wicked old coyote but then she went and let him go — what’s got into her, Dad?”

“The barn was red today, son,” he says.

Late afternoon: the sun mellow, more orange than white. Purpling clots of shadow hang from the branches, ravel out from the tree trunks. Bees and wasps and flies saw away at the wet full-bellied air. Timmy and the dog are far out beyond the north pasture, out by the old Indian burial mound, where the boy stoops now to search for arrowheads. Oddly, the collie is not watching him: instead she’s pacing the crest above, whimpering softly, pausing from time to time to stare out across the forest, her eyes distant and moonstruck. Behind her, storm clouds squat on the horizon like dark kidneys or brains.

We observe the wind kicking up: leaves flapping like wash, saplings quivering, weeds whipping. It darkens quickly now, the clouds scudding low and smoky over the treetops, blotting the sun from view. Lassie’s white is whiter than ever, highlighted against the dark horizon, the wind-whipped hair foaming around her. Still she doesn’t look down at the boy: he digs, dirty-kneed, stoop-backed, oblivious. Then the first fat random drops, a flash, the volcanic blast of thunder. Timmy glances over his shoulder at the noise: he’s just in time to watch the scorched pine plummeting toward the constellated freckles in the center of his forehead. Now the collie turns — too late! — the swoosh-whack! of the tree, the trembling needles. She’s there in an instant, tearing at the green welter, struggling through to his side. He lies unconscious in the muddying earth, hair artistically arranged, a thin scratch painted on his cheek. The trunk lies across the small of his back like the tail of a brontosaurus. The rain falls.

Lassie tugs doggedly at a knob in the trunk, her pretty paws slipping in the wet — but it’s no use — it would take a block and tackle, a crane, an army of Bunyans to shift that stubborn bulk. She falters, licks at his ear, whimpers. We observe the troubled look in her eye as she hesitates, uncertain, priorities warring: should she stand guard, or dash for help? The decision is sure and swift — her eyes firm with purpose and she is off like a shard of shrapnel, already up the hill, shooting past the dripping trees, over the river, already cleaving through the high wet banks of wheat.

A moment later she’s dashing through the puddled and rain-screened barnyard, barking right on up to the back door, where she pauses to scratch daintily, her voice high-pitched and insistent. Mom swings open the door and the collie pads in, claws clacking on the shiny linoleum. “What is it, girl? What’s the matter? Where’s Timmy?”

“Yarf! Yarfata-yarf-yarf!”

“Oh my! Dad! Dad, come quickly!”

Dad rushes in, his face stolid and reassuring as the Lincoln Memorial. “What is it, dear? … Why, Lassie?”

“Oh Dad, Timmy’s trapped under a pine tree out by the old Indian burial ground—”

“Arpit-arp.”

“—a mile and a half past the north pasture.”

Dad is quick, firm, decisive. “Lassie — you get back up there and stand watch over Timmy … Mom and I’ll go for Doc Walker. Hurry now!”

The collie hesitates at the door: “Rarf-arrar-ra!”

“Right,” says Dad. “Mom, fetch the chainsaw.”

We’re back in the woods now. A shot of the mud-running burial mound locates us — yes, there’s the fallen pine, and there: Timmy. He lies in a puddle, eyes closed, breathing slow. The hiss of the rain is loud as static. We see it at work: scattering leaves, digging trenches, inciting streams to swallow their banks. It lies deep now in the low areas, and in the mid areas, and in the high areas. Then a shot of the dam, some indeterminate (but short we presume) distance off, the yellow water churning over its lip like urine, the ugly earthen belly distended, blistered with the pressure. Raindrops pock the surface like a plague.

Suddenly the music plunges to those thunderous crouching chords — we’re back at the pine now — what is it? There: the coyote. Sniffing, furtive, the malicious eyes, the crouch and slink. He stiffens when he spots the boy — but then slouches closer, a rubbery dangle drooling from between his mismeshed teeth. Closer. Right over the prone figure now, those ominous chords setting up ominous vibrations in our bowels. He stoops, head dipping between his shoulders, irises caught in the corners of his eyes: wary, sly, predatory: the vulture slavering over the fallen fawn.

But wait! — here comes the collie, sprinting out of the wheatfield, bounding rock to rock across the crazed river, her limbs contourless with sheer speed and purpose, the music racing in a mad heroic prestissimo!

The jolting front seat of a Ford. Dad, Mom and the Doctor, all dressed in rain slickers and flap-brimmed rain hats, sitting shoulder to shoulder behind the clapping wipers. Their jaws set with determination, eyes aflicker with pioneer gumption.

The coyote’s jaws, serrated grinders, work at the tough bone and cartilage of Timmy’s left hand. The boy’s eyelids flutter with the pain, and he lifts his head feebly — but almost immediately it slaps down again, flat and volitionless, in the mud. At that instant Lassie blazes over the hill like a cavalry charge, show-dog indignation aflame in her eyes. The scrag of a coyote looks up at her, drooling blood, choking down frantic bits of flesh. Looks up at her from eyes that go back thirty million years, savage and bloodlustful and free. Looks up unmoved, un-cringing, the bloody snout and steady yellow eyes less a physical challenge than philosophical. We watch the collie’s expression alter in midbound — the look of offended AKC morality giving way, dissolving. She skids to a halt, drops her tail and approaches him, a buttery gaze in her golden eyes. She licks the blood from his lips.

The dam. Impossibly swollen, rain festering the yellow surface, a hundred new streams a minute rampaging in, the pressure of those millions of gallons hard-punching those millions more. There! the first gap, the water spewing out, a burst bubo. And now the dam shudders, splinters, falls to pieces like so much cheap pottery. The roar is devastating.

The two animals start at that terrible rumbling, and, still working their gummy jaws, they dash up the far side of the hill. We watch the white-tipped tail retreating side by side with the hacked and tick-blistered gray one — wagging like raggled banners as they disappear into the trees at the top of the rise. We’re left with a tableau: the rain, the fallen pine in the crotch of the valley’s V, the spot of the boy’s head. And that chilling roar in our ears. Suddenly the wall of water appears at the far end of the V, smashing through the little declivity like a god-sized fist, prickling with shattered trunks and boulders, grinding along like a quick-melted glacier, like planets in collision. We cut to Timmy: eyes closed, hair plastered, his left arm looking as though it should be wrapped in butcher’s paper. How? we wonder. How will they ever get him out of this? But then we see them — Mom, Dad and the Doctor — struggling up that same rise, rushing with the frenetic music now, the torrent seething closer, booming and howling. Dad launches himself in full charge down the hillside — but the water is already sweeping over the fallen pine, lifting it like paper — there’s a blur, a quick clip of a typhoon at sea (is that a flash of blond hair?), and it’s over. The valley is filled to the top of the rise, the water ribbed and rushing like the Colorado in adolescence. Dad’s pants are wet to the crotch.

Mom’s face, the Doctor’s. Rain. And then the opening strains of the theme song, one violin at first, swelling in mournful mid-American triumph as the full orchestra comes in, tearful, beautiful, heroic, sweeping us up and out of the dismal rain, back to the golden wheatfields in the midday sun. The boy cups his hands to his mouth and pipes: “Laahh-sie! Laahh-sie!” And then we see it — way out there at the end of the field — the ripple, the dashing furrow, the blur of the streaking dog, white chest, flashing feet.

(1974)

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

I’d never really thought much about meat. It was there in the supermarket in a plastic wrapper; it came between slices of bread with mayo and mustard and a dill pickle on the side; it sputtered and smoked on the grill till somebody flipped it over, and then it appeared on the plate, between the baked potato and the julienne carrots, neatly cross-hatched and floating in a puddle of red juice. Beef, mutton, pork, venison, dripping burgers and greasy ribs — it was all the same to me, food, the body’s fuel, something to savor a moment on the tongue before the digestive system went to work on it. Which is not to say I was totally unconscious of the deeper implications. Every once in a while I’d eat at home, a quartered chicken, a package of Shake ‘n Bake, Stove Top stuffing and frozen peas, and as I hacked away at the stippled yellow skin and pink flesh of the sanitized bird I’d wonder at the darkish bits of organ clinging to the ribs — what was that, liver? kidney? — but in the end it didn’t make me any less fond of Kentucky Fried or Chicken McNuggets. I saw those ads in the magazines, too, the ones that showed the veal calves penned up in their own waste, their limbs atrophied and their veins so pumped full of antibiotics they couldn’t control their bowels, but when I took a date to Anna Maria’s, I could never resist the veal scallopini. And then I met Alena Jorgensen.

It was a year ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving — I remember the date because it was my birthday, my thirtieth, and I’d called in sick and gone to the beach to warm my face, read a book and feel a little sorry for myself. The Santa Anas were blowing and it was clear all the way to Catalina, but there was an edge to the air, a scent of winter hanging over Utah, and as far as I could see in either direction I had the beach pretty much to myself. I found a sheltered spot in a tumble of boulders, spread a blanket and settled down to attack the pastrami on rye I’d brought along for nourishment. Then I turned to my book — a comfortingly apocalyptic tract about the demise of the planet — and let the sun warm me as I read about the denuding of the rain forest, the poisoning of the atmosphere and the swift silent eradication of species. Gulls coasted by overhead. I saw the distant glint of jetliners.

I must have dozed, my head thrown back, the book spread open in my lap, because the next thing I remember, a strange dog was hovering over me and the sun had dipped behind the rocks. The dog was big, wild-haired, with one staring blue eye, and it just looked at me, ears slightly cocked, as if it expected a Milk-Bone or something. I was startled — not that I don’t like dogs, but here was this woolly thing poking its snout in my face — and I guess I must have made some sort of defensive gesture, because the dog staggered back a step and froze. Even in the confusion of the moment I could see that there was something wrong with this dog, an unsteadiness, a gimp, a wobble to its legs. I felt a mixture of pity and revulsion — had it been hit by a car, was that it? — when all at once I became aware of a wetness on the breast of my windbreaker, and an unmistakable odor rose to my nostrils: I’d been pissed on.

Pissed on. As I lay there unsuspecting, enjoying the sun, the beach, the solitude, this stupid beast had lifted its leg and used me as a pissoir — and now it was poised there on the edge of the blanket as if it expected a reward. A sudden rage seized me. I came up off the blanket with a curse, and it was only then that a dim apprehension seemed to seep into the dog’s other eye, the brown one, and it lurched back and fell on its face, just out of reach. And then it lurched and fell again, bobbing and weaving across the sand like a seal out of water. I was on my feet now, murderous, glad to see that the thing was hobbled — it would simplify the task of running it down and beating it to death.

“Alf!” a voice called, and as the dog floundered in the sand, I turned and saw Alena Jorgensen poised on the boulder behind me. I don’t want to make too much of the moment, don’t want to mythologize it or clutter the scene with allusions to Aphrodite rising from the waves or accepting the golden apple from Paris, but she was a pretty impressive sight. Bare-legged, fluid, as tall and uncompromising as her Nordic ancestors and dressed in a Gore-Tex bikini and hooded sweatshirt unzipped to the waist, she blew me away, in any event, piss-spattered and stupefied, I could only gape up at her.

“You bad boy,” she said, scolding, “you get out of there.” She glanced from the dog to me and back again. “Oh, you bad boy, what have you done?” she demanded, and I was ready to admit to anything, but it was the dog she was addressing, and the dog flopped over in the sand as if it had been shot. Alena skipped lightly down from the rock, and in the next moment, before I could protest, she was rubbing at the stain on my windbreaker with the wadded-up hem of her sweatshirt.

I tried to stop her—“It’s all right,” I said, “it’s nothing,” as if dogs routinely pissed on my wardrobe — but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“No,” she said, rubbing, her hair flying in my face, the naked skin of her thigh pressed unconsciously to my own, “no, this is terrible, I’m so embarrassed — Alf, you bad boy — I’ll clean it for you, I will, it’s the least — oh, look at that, it’s stained right through to your T-shirt—”

I could smell her, the mousse she used in her hair, a lilac soap or perfume, the salt-sweet odor of her sweat — she’d been jogging, that was it. I murmured something about taking it to the cleaner’s myself.

She stopped rubbing and straightened up. She was my height, maybe even a fraction taller, and her eyes were ever so slightly mismatched, like the dog’s: a deep earnest blue in the right iris, shading to sea-green and turquoise in the left. We were so close we might have been dancing. “Tell you what,” she said, and her face lit with a smile, “since you’re so nice about the whole thing, and most people wouldn’t be, even if they knew what poor Alf has been through, why don’t you let me wash it for you — and the T-shirt too?”

I was a little disconcerted at this point — I was the one who’d been pissed on, after all — but my anger was gone. I felt weightless, adrift, like a piece of fluff floating on the breeze. “Listen,” I said, and for the moment I couldn’t look her in the eye, “I don’t want to put you to any trouble….”

“I’m ten minutes up the beach, and I’ve got a washer and dryer. Come on, it’s no trouble at all. Or do you have plans? I mean, I could just pay for the cleaner’s if you want….”

I was between relationships — the person I’d been seeing off and on for the past year wouldn’t even return my calls — and my plans consisted of taking in a solitary late-afternoon movie as a birthday treat, then heading over to my mother’s for dinner and the cake with the candles. My aunt Irene would be there, and so would my grandmother. They would exclaim over how big I was and how handsome and then they would begin to contrast my present self with my previous, more diminutive incarnations, and finally work themselves up to a spate of reminiscence that would continue unabated till my mother drove them home. And then, if I was lucky, I’d go out to a singles bar and make the acquaintance of a divorced computer programmer in her mid-thirties with three kids and bad breath.

I shrugged. “Plans? No, not really. I mean, nothing in particular.”

Alena was housesitting a one-room bungalow that rose stump-like from the sand, no more than fifty feet from the tide line. There were trees in the yard behind it and the place was sandwiched between glass fortresses with crenellated decks, whipping flags and great hulking concrete pylons. Sitting on the couch inside, you could feel the dull reverberation of each wave hitting the shore, a slow steady pulse that forever defined the place for me. Alena gave me a faded UC Davis sweatshirt that nearly fit, sprayed a stain remover on my T-shirt and wind-breaker, and in a single fluid motion flipped down the lid of the washer and extracted two beers from the refrigerator beside it.

There was an awkward moment as she settled into the chair opposite me and we concentrated on our beers. I didn’t know what to say. I was disoriented, giddy, still struggling to grasp what had happened. Fifteen minutes earlier I’d been dozing on the beach, alone on my birthday and feeling sorry for myself, and now I was ensconced in a cozy beach house, in the presence of Alena Jorgensen and her naked spill of leg, drinking a beer. “So what do you do?” she said, setting her beer down on the coffee table.

I was grateful for the question, too grateful maybe. I described to her at length how dull my job was, nearly ten years with the same agency, writing ad copy, my brain gone numb with disuse. I was somewhere in the middle of a blow-by-blow account of our current campaign for a Ghanian vodka distilled from calabash husks when she said, “I know what you mean,” and told me she’d dropped out of veterinary school herself. “After I saw what they did to the animals. I mean, can you see neutering a dog just for our convenience, just because it’s easier for us if they don’t have a sex life?” Her voice grew hot. “It’s the same old story, species fascism at its worst.”

Alf was lying at my feet, grunting softly and looking up mournfully out of his staring blue eye, as blameless a creature as ever lived. I made a small noise of agreement and then focused on Alf. “And your dog,” I said, “he’s arthritic? Or is it hip dysplasia or what?” I was pleased with myself for the question — aside from “tapeworm,” “hip dysplasia” was the only veterinary term I could dredge up from the memory bank, and I could see that Alf’s problems ran deeper than worms.

Alena looked angry suddenly. “Don’t I wish,” she said. She paused to draw a bitter breath. “There’s nothing wrong with Alf that wasn’t inflicted on him. They tortured him, maimed him, mutilated him.”

“Tortured him?” I echoed, feeling the indignation rise in me — this beautiful girl, this innocent beast. “Who?”

Alena leaned forward and there was real hate in her eyes. She mentioned a prominent shoe company — spat out the name, actually. It was an ordinary name, a familiar one, and it hung in the air between us, suddenly sinister. Alf had been part of an experiment to market booties for dogs — suede, cordovan, patent leather, the works. The dogs were made to pace a treadmill in their booties, to assess wear; Alf was part of the control group.

“Control group?” I could feel the hackles rising on the back of my neck.

“They used eighty-grit sandpaper on the treads, to accelerate the process.” Alena shot a glance out the window to where the surf pounded the shore; she bit her lip. “Alf was one of the dogs without booties.”

I was stunned. I wanted to get up and comfort her, but I might as well have been grafted to the chair. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “How could anybody—”

“Believe it,” she said. She studied me a moment, then set down her beer and crossed the room to dig through a cardboard box in the corner. If I was moved by the emotion she’d called up, I was moved even more by the sight of her bending over the box in her Gore-Tex bikini; I clung to the edge of the chair as if it were a plunging roller coaster. A moment later she dropped a dozen file folders in my lap. The uppermost bore the name of the shoe company, and it was crammed with news clippings, several pages of a diary relating to plant operations and workers’ shifts at the Grand Rapids facility and a floor plan of the laboratories. The folders beneath it were inscribed with the names of cosmetics firms, biomedical research centers, furriers, tanners, meatpackers. Alena perched on the edge of the coffee table and watched as I shuffled through them. “You know the Draize test?”

I gave her a blank look.

“They inject chemicals into rabbits’ eyes to see how much it’ll take before they go blind. The rabbits are in cages, thousands of them, and they take a needle and jab it into their eyes — and you know why, you know in the name of what great humanitarian cause this is going on, even as we speak?”

I didn’t know. The surf pounded at my feet. I glanced at Alf and then back into her angry eyes.

“Mascara, that’s what. Mascara. They torture countless thousands of rabbits so women can look like sluts.”

I thought the characterization a bit harsh, but when I studied her pale lashes and tight lipstickless mouth, I saw that she meant it. At any rate, the notion set her off, and she launched into a two-hour lecture, gesturing with her flawless hands, quoting figures, digging through her files for the odd photo of legless mice or morphine-addicted gerbils. She told me how she’d rescued Alf herself, raiding the laboratory with six other members of the Animal Liberation Front, the militant group in honor of which Alf had been named. At first, she’d been content to write letters and carry placards, but now, with the lives of so many animals at stake, she’d turned to more direct action: harassment, vandalism, sabotage. She described how she’d spiked trees with Earth-First! — ers in Oregon, cut miles of barbed-wire fence on cattle ranches in Nevada, destroyed records in biomedical research labs up and down the coast and insinuated herself between the hunters and the bighorn sheep in the mountains of Arizona. I could only nod and exclaim, smile ruefully and whistle in a low “holy cow!” sort of way. Finally, she paused to level her unsettling eyes on me. “You know what Isaac Bashevis Singer said?”

We were on our third beer. The sun was gone. I didn’t have a clue.

Alena leaned forward. “’Every day is Auschwitz for the animals.’”

I looked down into the amber aperture of my beer bottle and nodded my head sadly. The dryer had stopped an hour and a half ago. I wondered if she’d go out to dinner with me, and what she could eat if she did. “Uh, I was wondering,” I said, “if… if you might want to go out for something to eat—”

Alf chose that moment to heave himself up from the floor and urinate on the wall behind me. My dinner proposal hung in the balance as Alena shot up off the edge of the table to scold him and then gently usher him out the door. “Poor Alf,” she sighed, turning back to me with a shrug. “But listen, I’m sorry if I talked your head off — I didn’t mean to, but it’s rare to find somebody on your own wavelength.”

She smiled. On your own wavelength: the words illuminated me, excited me, sent up a tremor I could feel all the way down in the deepest nodes of my reproductive tract. “So how about dinner?” I persisted. Restaurants were running through my head — would it have to be veggie? Could there be even a whiff of grilled flesh on the air? Curdled goat’s milk and tabbouleh, tofu, lentil soup, sprouts: Every day is Auschwitz for animals. “No place with meat, of course.”

She just looked at me.

“I mean, I don’t eat meat myself,” I lied, “or actually, not anymore”—since the pastrami sandwich, that is—“but I don’t really know any place that …” I

trailed off lamely.

“I’m a Vegan,” she said.

After two hours of blind bunnies, butchered calves and mutilated pups, I couldn’t resist the joke. “I’m from Venus myself.”

She laughed, but I could see she didn’t find it all that funny. Vegans didn’t eat meat or fish, she explained, or milk or cheese or eggs, and they didn’t wear wool or leather — or fur, of course.

“Of course,” I said. We were both standing there, hovering over the coffee table. I was beginning to feel a little foolish.

“Why don’t we just eat here,” she said.

The deep throb of the ocean seemed to settle in my bones as we lay there in bed that night, Alena and I, and I learned all about the fluency of her limbs and the sweetness of her vegetable tongue. Alf sprawled on the floor beneath us, wheezing and groaning in his sleep, and I blessed him for his incontinence and his doggy stupidity. Something was happening to me — I could feel it in the way the boards shifted under me, feel it with each beat of the surf — and I was ready to go along with it. In the morning, I called in sick again.

Alena was watching me from bed as I dialed the office and described how the flu had migrated from my head to my gut and beyond, and there was a look in her eye that told me I would spend the rest of the day right there beside her, peeling grapes and dropping them one by one between her parted and expectant lips. I was wrong. Half an hour later, after a breakfast of brewer’s yeast and what appeared to be some sort of bark marinated in yogurt, I found myself marching up and down the sidewalk in front of a fur emporium in Beverly Hills, waving a placard that read HOW DOES IT FEEL TO WEAR A CORPSE? in letters that dripped like blood.

It was a shock. I’d seen protest marches on TV, antiwar rallies and civil-rights demonstrations and all that, but I’d never warmed my heels on the pavement or chanted slogans or felt the naked stick in my hand. There were maybe forty of us in all, mostly women, and we waved our placards at passing cars and blocked traffic on the sidewalk. One woman had smeared her face and hands with cold cream steeped in red dye, and Alena had found a ratty mink stole somewhere — the kind that features whole animals sewed together, snout to tail, their miniature limbs dangling — and she’d taken a can of crimson spray paint to their muzzles so that they looked freshly killed. She brandished this grisly banner on a stick high above her head, whooping like a savage and chanting, “Fur is death, fur is death,” over and over again till it became a mantra for the crowd. The day was unseasonably warm, the Jaguars glinted in the sun and the palms nodded in the breeze, and no one, but for a single tight-lipped salesman glowering from behind the store’s immaculate windows, paid the slightest bit of attention to us.

I marched out there on the street, feeling exposed and conspicuous, but marching nonetheless — for Alena’s sake and for the sake of the foxes and martens and all the rest, and for my own sake too: with each step I took I could feel my consciousness expanding like a balloon, the breath of saintliness seeping steadily into me. Up to this point I’d worn suede and leather like anybody else, ankle boots and Air Jordans, a bombardier jacket I’d had since high school. If I’d drawn the line with fur, it was only because I’d never had any use for it. If I lived in the Yukon — and sometimes, drowsing through a meeting at work, I found myself fantasizing about it — I would have worn fur, no compunction, no second thoughts.

But not anymore. Now I was a protestor, a placard waver, now I was fighting for the right of every last weasel and lynx to grow old and die gracefully, now I was Alena Jorgensen’s lover and a force to be reckoned with. Of course, my feet hurt and I was running sweat and praying that no one from work would drive by and see me there on the sidewalk with my crazy cohorts and denunciatory sign.

We marched for hours, back and forth, till I thought we’d wear a groove in the pavement. We chanted and jeered and nobody so much as looked at us twice. We could have been Hare Krishnas, bums, antiabortionists or lepers, what did it matter? To the rest of the world, to the uninitiated masses to whose sorry number I’d belonged just twenty-four hours earlier, we were invisible. I was hungry, tired, discouraged. Alena was ignoring me. Even the woman in red-face was slowing down, her chant a hoarse whisper that was sucked up and obliterated in the roar of traffic. And then, as the afternoon faded toward rush hour, a wizened silvery old woman who might have been an aging star or a star’s mother or even the first dimly remembered wife of a studio exec got out of a long white car at the curb and strode fearlessly toward us. Despite the heat — it must have been eighty degrees at this point — she was wearing an ankle-length silver fox coat, a bristling shouldery wafting mass of peltry that must have decimated every burrow on the tundra. It was the moment we’d been waiting for.

A cry went up, shrill and ululating, and we converged on the lone old woman like a Cheyenne war party scouring the plains. The man beside me went down on all fours and howled like a dog, Alena slashed the air with her limp mink and the blood sang in my ears. “Murderer!” I screamed, getting into it. “Torturer! Nazi!” The strings in my neck were tight. I didn’t know what I was saying. The crowd gibbered. The placards danced. I was so close to the old woman I could smell her — her perfume, a whiff of mothballs from the coat — and it intoxicated me, maddened me, and I stepped in front of her and blocked her path with all the seething militant bulk of my one hundred eighty-five pounds of sinew and muscle.

I never saw the chauffeur. Alena told me afterward that he was a former kick-boxing champion who’d been banned from the sport for excessive brutality. The first blow seemed to drop down from above, a shell lobbed from deep within enemy territory; the others came at me like a windmill churning in a storm. Someone screamed. I remember focusing on the flawless rigid pleats of the chauffeur’s trousers, and then things got a bit hazy.

I woke to the dull thump of the surf slamming at the shore and the touch of Alena’s lips on my own. I felt as if I’d been broken on the wheel, dismembered and put back together again. “Lie still,” she said, and her tongue moved against my swollen cheek. Stricken, I could only drag my head across the pillow and gaze into the depths of her parti-colored eyes. “You’re one of us now,” she whispered.

Next morning I didn’t even bother to call in sick.

By the end of the week I’d recovered enough to crave meat, for which I felt deeply ashamed, and to wear out a pair of vinyl huaraches on the picket line. Together, and with various coalitions of antivivisectionists, militant Vegans and cat lovers, Alena and I tramped a hundred miles of sidewalk, spray-painted inflammatory slogans across the windows of supermarkets and burger stands, denounced tanners, farriers, poulterers and sausage makers, and somehow found time to break up a cockfight in Pacoima. It was exhilarating, heady, dangerous. If I’d been disconnected in the past, I was plugged in now. I felt righteous — for the first time in my life I had a cause — and I had Alena, Alena above all. She fascinated me, fixated me, made me feel like a tomcat leaping in and out of second-story windows, oblivious to the free-fall and the picket fence below. There was her beauty, of course, a triumph of evolution and the happy interchange of genes going all the way back to the cavemen, but it was more than that — it was her commitment to animals, to the righting of wrongs, to morality that made her irresistible. Was it love? The term is something I’ve always had difficulty with, but I suppose it was. Sure it was. Love, pure and simple. I had it, it had me.

“You know what?” Alena said one night as she stood over the miniature stove, searing tofu in oil and garlic. We’d spent the afternoon demonstrating out front of a tortilla factory that used rendered animal fat as a congealing agent, after which we’d been chased three blocks by an overweight assistant manager at Von’s who objected to Alena’s spray-painting MEAT IS DEATH over the specials in the front window. I was giddy with the adolescent joy of it. I sank into the couch with a beer and watched Alf limp across the floor to fling himself down and lick at a suspicious spot on the floor. The surf boomed like thunder.

“What?” I said.

“Thanksgiving’s coming.”

I let it ride a moment, wondering if I should invite Alena to my mother’s for the big basted bird stuffed with canned oysters and buttered bread crumbs, and then realized it probably wouldn’t be such a great idea. I said nothing.

She glanced over her shoulder. “The animals don’t have a whole lot to be thankful for, that’s for sure. It’s just an excuse for the meat industry to butcher a couple million turkeys, is all it is.” She paused; hot safflower oil popped in the pan. “I think it’s time for a little road trip,” she said. “Can we take your car?”

“Sure, but where are we going?”

She gave me her Gioconda smile. “To liberate some turkeys.”

In the morning I called my boss to tell him I had pancreatic cancer and wouldn’t be in for a while, then we threw some things in the car, helped Alf scrabble into the back seat, and headed up Route 5 for the San Joaquin Valley. We drove for three hours through a fog so dense the windows might as well have been packed with cotton. Alena was secretive, but I could see she was excited. I knew only that we were on our way to rendezvous with a certain “Rolfe,” a longtime friend of hers and a big name in the world of ecotage and animal rights, after which we would commit some desperate and illegal act, for which the turkeys would be eternally grateful.

There was a truck stalled in front of the sign for our exit at Calpurnia Springs, and I had to brake hard and jerk the wheel around twice to keep the tires on the pavement. Alena came up out of her seat and Alf slammed into the armrest like a sack of meal, but we made it. A few minutes later we were gliding through the ghostly vacancy of the town itself, lights drifting past in a nimbus of fog, glowing pink, yellow and white, and then there was only the blacktop road and the pale void that engulfed it. We’d gone ten miles or so when Alena instructed me to slow down and began to study the right-hand shoulder with a keen, unwavering eye.

The earth breathed in and out. I squinted hard into the soft drifting glow of the headlights. “There, there!” she cried and I swung the wheel to the right, and suddenly we were lurching along a pitted dirt road that rose up from the blacktop like a goat path worn into the side of a mountain. Five minutes later Alf sat up in the back seat and began to whine, and then a crude unpainted shack began to detach itself from the vagueness around us.

Rolfe met us on the porch. He was tall and leathery, in his fifties, I guessed, with a shock of hair and rutted features that brought Samuel Beckett to mind. He was wearing gumboots and jeans and a faded lumberjack shirt that looked as if it had been washed a hundred times. Alf took a quick pee against the side of the house, then fumbled up the steps to roll over and fawn at his feet.

“Rolfe!” Alena called, and there was too much animation in her voice, too much familiarity, for my taste. She took the steps in a bound and threw herself in his arms. I watched them kiss, and it wasn’t a fatherly-daughterly sort of kiss, not at all. It was a kiss with some meaning behind it, and I didn’t like it. Rolfe, I thought: What kind of name is that?

“Rolfe,” Alena gasped, still a little breathless from bouncing up the steps like a cheerleader, “I’d like you to meet Jim.”

This was my signal. I ascended the porch steps and held out my hand. Rolfe gave me a look out of the hooded depths of his eyes and then took my hand in a hard callused grip, the grip of the wood splitter, the fence mender, the liberator of hothouse turkeys and laboratory mice. “A pleasure,” he said, and his voice rasped like sandpaper.

There was a fire going inside, and Alena and I sat before it and warmed our hands while Alf whined and sniffed and Rolfe served Red Zinger tea in Japanese cups the size of thimbles. Alena hadn’t stopped chattering since we stepped through the door, and Rolfe came right back at her in his woodsy rasp, the two of them exchanging names and news and gossip as if they were talking in code. I studied the reproductions of teal and widgeon that hung from the peeling walls, noted the case of Heinz vegetarian beans in the corner and the half-gallon of Jack Daniel’s on the mantel. Finally, after the third cup of tea, Alena settled back in her chair — a huge old Salvation Army sort of thing with a soiled antimacassar — and said, “So what’s the plan?”

Rolfe gave me another look, a quick predatory darting of the eyes, as if he weren’t sure I could be trusted, and then turned back to Alena. “Hedda Gabler’s Range-Fed Turkey Ranch,” he said. “And no, I don’t find the name cute, not at all.” He looked at me now, a long steady assay. “They grind up the heads for cat food, and the neck, the organs and the rest, that they wrap up in paper and stuff back in the body cavity like it was a war atrocity or something. Whatever did a turkey go and do to us to deserve a fate like that?”

The question was rhetorical, even if it seemed to have been aimed at me, and I made no response other than to compose my face in a look that wedded grief, outrage and resolve. I was thinking of all the turkeys I’d sent to their doom, of the plucked wishbones, the pope’s noses and the crisp browned skin I used to relish as a kid. It brought a lump to my throat, and something more: I realized I was hungry.

“Ben Franklin wanted to make them our national symbol,” Alena chimed in, “did you know that? But the meat eaters won out.”

“Fifty thousand birds,” Rolfe said, glancing at Alena and bringing his incendiary gaze back to rest on me. “I have information they’re going to start slaughtering them tomorrow, for the fresh-not-frozen market.”

“Yuppie poultry.” Alena’s voice was drenched in disgust.

For a moment, no one spoke. I became aware of the crackling of the fire. The fog pressed at the windows. It was getting dark.

“You can see the place from the highway,” Rolfe said finally, “but the only access is through Calpurnia Springs. It’s about twenty miles — twenty-two point three, to be exact.”

Alena’s eyes were bright. She was gazing on Rolfe as if he’d just dropped down from heaven. I felt something heave in my stomach.

“We strike tonight.”

Rolfe insisted that we take my car—“Everybody around here knows my pickup, and I can’t take any chances on a little operation like this”—but we did mask the plates, front and back, with an inch-thick smear of mud. We blackened our faces like commandos and collected our tools from the shed out back — tin snips, a crowbar and two five-gallon cans of gasoline. “Gasoline?” I said, trying the heft of the can. Rolfe gave me a craggy look. “To create a diversion,” he said. Alf, for obvious reasons, stayed behind in the shack.

If the fog had been thick in daylight, it was impermeable now, the sky collapsed upon the earth. It took hold of the headlights and threw them back at me till my eyes began to water from the effort of keeping the car on the road. But for the ruts and bumps we might have been floating in space. Alena sat up front between Rolfe and me, curiously silent. Rolfe didn’t have much to say either, save for the occasional grunted command: “Hang a right here”; “Hard left”; “Easy, easy.” I thought about meat and jail and the heroic proportions to which I was about to swell in Alena’s eyes and what I intended to do to her when we finally got to bed. It was 2:00 A.M. by the dashboard clock.

“Okay,” Rolfe said, and his voice came at me so suddenly it startled me, “pull over here — and kill the lights.”

We stepped out into the hush of night and eased the doors shut behind us. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could hear the not-so-distant hiss of traffic on the highway, and another sound, too, muffled and indistinct, the gentle unconscious suspiration of thousands upon thousands of my fellow creatures. And I could smell them, a seething rancid odor of feces and feathers and naked scaly feet that crawled down my throat and burned my nostrils. “Whew,” I said in a whisper, “I can smell them.”

Rolfe and Alena were vague presences at my side. Rolfe flipped open the trunk and in the next moment I felt the heft of a crowbar and a pair of tin snips in my hand. “Listen, you, Jim,” Rolfe whispered, taking me by the wrist in his iron grip and leading me half-a-dozen steps forward. “Feel this?”

I felt a grid of wire, which he promptly cut: snip, snip, snip.

“This is their enclosure — they’re out there in the day, scratching around in the dirt. You get lost, you follow this wire. Now, you’re going to take a section out of this side, Alena’s got the west side and I’ve got the south. Once that’s done I signal with the flashlight and we bust open the doors to the turkey houses — they’re these big low white buildings, you’ll see them when you get close — and flush the birds out. Don’t worry about me or Alena. Just worry about getting as many birds out as you can.”

I was worried. Worried about everything, from some half-crazed farmer with a shotgun or AK-47 or whatever they carried these days, to losing Alena in the fog, to the turkeys themselves: How big were they? Were they violent? They had claws and beaks, didn’t they? And how were they going to feel about me bursting into their bedroom in the middle of the night?

“And when the gas cans go up, you hightail it back to the car, got it?”

I could hear the turkeys tossing in their sleep. A truck shifted gears out on the highway. “I think so,” I whispered.

“And one more thing — be sure to leave the keys in the ignition.”

This gave me pause. “But—”

“The getaway.” Alena was so close I could feel her breath on my ear. “I mean, we don’t want to be fumbling around for the keys when all hell is breaking loose out there, do we?”

I eased open the door and reinserted the keys in the ignition, even though the automatic buzzer warned me against it. “Okay,” I murmured, but they were already gone, soaked up in the shadows and the mist. At this point my heart was hammering so loudly I could barely hear the rustling of the turkeys — this is crazy, I told myself, it’s hurtful and wrong, not to mention illegal. Spray-painting slogans was one thing, but this was something else altogether. I thought of the turkey farmer asleep in his bed, an entrepreneur working to make America strong, a man with a wife and kids and a mortgage … but then I thought of all those innocent turkeys consigned to death, and finally I thought of Alena, long-legged and loving, and the way she came to me out of the darkness of the bathroom and the boom of the surf. I took the tin snips to the wire.

I must have been at it half an hour, forty-five minutes, gradually working my way toward the big white sheds that had begun to emerge from the gloom up ahead, when I saw Rolfe’s flashlight blinking off to my left. This was my signal to head to the nearest shed, snap off the padlock with my crowbar, fling open the doors and herd a bunch of cranky suspicious gobblers out into the night. It was now or never. I looked twice round me and then broke for the near shed in an awkward crouching gait. The turkeys must have sensed that something was up — from behind the long white windowless wall there arose a watchful gabbling, a soughing of feathers that fanned up like a breeze in the treetops. Hold on, you toms and hens, I thought, freedom is at hand. A jerk of the wrist, and the padlock fell to the ground. Blood pounding in my ears, I took hold of the sliding door and jerked it open with a great dull booming reverberation — and suddenly, there they were, turkeys, thousands upon thousands of them, cloaked in white feathers under a string of dim yellow bulbs. The light glinted in their reptilian eyes. Somewhere a dog began to bark.

I steeled myself and sprang through the door with a shout, whirling the crowbar over my head. “All right!” I boomed, and the echo gave it back to me a hundred times over, “this is it! Turkeys, on your feet!” Nothing. No response. But for the whisper of rustling feathers and the alertly cocked heads, they might have been sculptures, throw pillows, they might as well have been dead and butchered and served up with yams and onions and all the trimmings. The barking of the dog went up a notch. I thought I heard voices.

The turkeys crouched on the concrete floor, wave upon wave of them, stupid and immovable; they perched in the rafters, on shelves and platforms, huddled in wooden stalls. Desperate, I rushed into the front rank of them, swinging my crowbar, stamping my feet and howling like the wishbone plucker I once was. That did it. There was a shriek from the nearest bird and the others took it up till an unholy racket filled the place, and now they were moving, tumbling down from their perches, flapping their wings in a storm of dried excrement and pecked-over grain, pouring across the concrete floor till it vanished beneath them. Encouraged, I screamed again—“Yeeee-ha-ha-ha-ha!”—and beat at the aluminum walls with the crowbar as the turkeys shot through the doorway and out into the night.

It was then that the black mouth of the doorway erupted with light and the ka-boom! of the gas cans sent a tremor through the earth. Run! a voice screamed in my head, and the adrenaline kicked in and all of a sudden I was scrambling for the door in a hurricane of turkeys. They were everywhere, flapping their wings, gobbling and screeching, loosing their bowels in panic. Something hit the back of my legs and all at once I was down amongst them, on the floor, in the dirt and feathers and wet turkey shit. I was a roadbed, a turkey expressway. Their claws dug at my back, my shoulders, the crown of my head. Panicked now, choking on feathers and dust and worse, I fought to my feet as the big screeching birds launched themselves round me, and staggered out into the barnyard. “There! Who’s that there?” a voice roared, and I was off and running.

What can I say? I vaulted turkeys, kicked them aside like so many footballs, slashed and tore at them as they sailed through the air. I ran till my lungs felt as if they were burning right through my chest, disoriented, bewildered, terrified of the shotgun blast I was sure would cut me down at any moment. Behind me the fire raged and lit the fog till it glowed blood-red and hellish. But where was the fence? And where the car?

I got control of my feet then and stood stock-still in a flurry of turkeys, squinting into the wall of fog. Was that it? Was that the car over there? At that moment I heard an engine start up somewhere behind me — a familiar engine with a familiar coughing gurgle in the throat of the carburetor — and then the lights blinked on briefly three hundred yards away. I heard the engine race and listened, helpless, as the car roared off in the opposite direction. I stood there a moment longer, forlorn and forsaken, and then I ran blindly off into the night, putting the fire and the shouts and the barking and the incessant mindless squawking of the turkeys as far behind me as I could.

When dawn finally broke, it was only just perceptibly, so thick was the fog. I’d made my way to a blacktop road — which road and where it led I didn’t know — and sat crouched and shivering in a clump of weed just off the shoulder. Alena wouldn’t desert me, I was sure of that — she loved me, as I loved her; needed me, as I needed her — and I was sure she’d be cruising along the back roads looking for me. My pride was wounded, of course, and if I never laid eyes on Rolfe again I felt I wouldn’t be missing much, but at least I hadn’t been drilled full of shot, savaged by farm dogs or pecked to death by irate turkeys. I was sore all over, my shin throbbed where I’d slammed into something substantial while vaulting through the night, there were feathers in my hair and my face and arms were a mosaic of cuts and scratches and long trailing fissures of dirt. I’d been sitting there for what seemed like hours, cursing Rolfe, developing suspicions about Alena and unflattering theories about environmentalists in general, when finally I heard the familiar slurp and roar of my Chevy Citation cutting through the mist ahead of me.

Rolfe was driving, his face impassive. I flung myself into the road like a tattered beggar, waving my arms over my head and giving vent to my joy,’ and he very nearly ran me down. Alena was out of the car before it stopped, wrapping me up in her arms, and then she was bundling me into the rear seat with Alf and we were on our way back to the hideaway. “What happened?” she cried, as if she couldn’t have guessed. “Where were you? We waited as long as we could.”

I was feeling sulky, betrayed, feeling as if I was owed a whole lot more than a perfunctory hug and a string of insipid questions. Still, as I told my tale I began to warm to it — they’d got away in the car with the heater going, and I’d stayed behind to fight the turkeys, the farmers and the elements, too, and if that wasn’t heroic, I’d like to know what was. I looked into Alena’s admiring eyes and pictured Rolfe’s shack, a nip or two from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, maybe a peanut-butter-and-tofu sandwich and then the bed, with Alena in it. Rolfe said nothing.

Back at Rolfe’s, I took a shower and scrubbed the turkey droppings from my pores, then helped myself to the bourbon. It was ten in the morning and the house was dark — if the world had ever been without fog, there was no sign of it here. When Rolfe stepped out on the porch to fetch an armload of firewood, I pulled Alena down into my lap. “Hey,” she murmured, “I thought you were an invalid.”

She was wearing a pair of too-tight jeans and an oversize sweater with nothing underneath it. I slipped my hand inside the sweater and found something to hold on to. “Invalid?” I said, nuzzling at her sleeve. “Hell, I’m a turkey liberator, an ecoguerrilla, a friend of the animals and the environment, too.”

She laughed, but she pushed herself up and crossed the room to stare out the occluded window. “Listen, Jim,” she said, “what we did last night was great, really great, but it’s just the beginning.” Alf looked up at her expectantly. I heard Rolfe fumbling around on the porch, the thump of wood on wood. She turned round to face me now. “What I mean is, Rolfe wants me to go up to Wyoming for a little bit, just outside of Yellowstone—”

Me? Rolfe wants me? There was no invitation in that, no plurality, no acknowledgment of all we’d done and meant to each other. “For what?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“There’s this grizzly — a pair of them, actually — and they’ve been raiding places outside the park. One of them made off with the mayor’s Doberman the other night and the people are up in arms. We — I mean Rolfe and me and some other people from the old Bolt Weevils in Minnesota? — we’re going to go up there and make sure the Park Service — or the local yahoos — don’t eliminate them. The bears, I mean.”

My tone was corrosive. “You and Rolfe?”

“There’s nothing between us, if that’s what you’re thinking. This has to do with animals, that’s all.”

“Like us?”

She shook her head slowly. “Not like us, no. We’re the plague on this planet, don’t you know that?”

Suddenly I was angry. Seething. Here I’d crouched in the bushes all night, covered in turkey crap, and now I was part of a plague. I was on my feet. “No, I don’t know that.”

She gave me a look that let me know it didn’t matter, that she was already gone, that her agenda, at least for the moment, didn’t include me and there was no use arguing about it. “Look,” she said, her voice dropping as Rolfe slammed back through the door with a load of wood, “I’ll see you in L.A. in a month or so, okay?” She gave me an apologetic smile. “Water the plants for me?”

An hour later I was on the road again. I’d helped Rolfe stack the wood beside the fireplace, allowed Alena to brush my lips with a goodbye kiss, and then stood there on the porch while Rolfe locked up, lifted Alf into the bed of his pickup and rumbled down the rutted dirt road with Alena at his side. I watched till their brake lights dissolved in the drifting gray mist, then fired up the Citation and lurched down the road behind them. A month or so: I felt hollow inside. I pictured her with Rolfe, eating soy yogurt and wheat germ, stopping at motels, wrestling grizzlies and spiking trees. The hollowness opened up, cored me out till I felt as if I’d been plucked and gutted and served up on a platter myself.

I found my way back through Calpurnia Springs without incident — there were no roadblocks, no flashing lights and grim-looking troopers searching trunks and back seats for a tallish thirty-year-old ecoterrorist with turkey tracks down his back — but after I turned onto the highway for Los Angeles, I had a shock. Ten miles up the road my nightmare materialized out of the gloom: red lights everywhere, signal flares and police cars lined up on the shoulder. I was on the very edge of panicking, a beat away from cutting across the meridian and giving them a run for it, when I saw the truck jackknifed up ahead. I slowed to forty, thirty, and then hit the brakes again. In a moment I was stalled in a line of cars and there was something all over the road, ghostly and white in the fog. At first I thought it must have been flung from the truck, rolls of toilet paper or crates of soap powder ruptured on the pavement. It was neither. As I inched closer, the tires creeping now, the pulse of the lights in my face, I saw that the road was coated in feathers, turkey feathers. A storm of them. A blizzard. And more: there was flesh there too, slick and greasy, a red pulp ground into the surface of the road, thrown up like slush from the tires of the car ahead of me, ground beneath the massive wheels of the truck. Turkeys. Turkeys everywhere.

The car crept forward. I flicked on the windshield wipers, hit the washer button, and for a moment a scrim of diluted blood obscured the windows and the hollowness opened up inside of me till I thought it would suck me inside out. Behind me, someone was leaning on his horn. A trooper loomed up out of the gloom, waving me on with the dead yellow eye of his flashlight. I thought of Ale.na and felt sick. All there was between us had come to this, expectations gone sour, a smear on the road. I wanted to get out and shoot myself, turn myself in, close my eyes and wake up in jail, in a hair shirt, in a straitjacket, anything. It went on. Time passed. Nothing moved. And then, miraculously, a vision began to emerge from behind the smeared glass and the gray belly of the fog, lights glowing golden in the waste. I saw the sign, Gas/Food/Lodging, and my hand was on the blinker.

It took me a moment, picturing the place, the generic tile, the false cheer of the lights, the odor of charred flesh hanging heavy on the air, Big Mac, three-piece dark meat, carne asada, cheeseburger. The engine coughed. The lights glowed. I didn’t think of Alena then, didn’t think of Rolfe or grizzlies or the doomed bleating flocks and herds, or of the blind bunnies and cancerous mice — I thought only of the cavern opening inside me and how to fill it. “Meat,” and I spoke the word aloud, talking to calm myself as if I’d awakened from a bad dream, “it’s only meat.”

(1990)

ACTS OF GOD

He’d been married before, and now he was married again. The last wife, Dixie, had taken the house, the car, the dog, the blender and his collection of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey records. The wife before that, Margot, had been his first, and he’d known her since he’d worn shoulder pads and spikes and she cried out his name from the sidelines, her big chocolate eyes wide with excitement and the black bobbed hair cutting a Spanish fringe across her brow; she’d taken the first house, the children and his self-respect. Muriel was different. She was a force upon the earth, an act of God, demanding, unshakable, born a queen, an empress, born to dictate and command. She took everything that was left.

And there wasn’t a whole lot of that. Willis was seventy-five years old — seventy-six, come October — he had some money in CDs and an undeveloped lot or two, he owned a pair of classic 1972 Ford Fairlanes—“classic” being a code word for junk — and he was so weak in the hips he had to work on his feet for fear he wouldn’t be able to get up again once he sat down. And work he did. He was a builder, a master builder, and he’d been in the trade for sixty years, working with the pride and compulsion his mother had instilled in him in a bygone era. No retirement villages for him, no putting greens or clubhouses. If you’re not working you might as well be dead, that’s how he saw it. And it wasn’t as if he had a choice — Muriel would never let him retire, or rest even. She worked him like a mule and he bowed his head and did what was expected of him.

For her part, Muriel had been married four times, counting the present arrangement. She’d pretty well forgotten the middle two husbands — tired men, tired under the eyes, in the blood, in bed — but the first had been a saint. Handsome, a saxophone player with wavy dark hair and a perfect little Ronald Colman mustache — and rich, too. His father owned a whole constellation of rental properties and a resort in the Catskills, with a lake and a casino and quaint little bungalows that looked as if they’d been lifted off their foundations in the English countryside and transported, lock, stock and barrel, to Gaudinet Lake. The shoulders on that man, Lester Gaudinet … she didn’t know why she’d ever divorced him. Of course, she had Willis now, and he was all right — if she kept after him. Still, as she sat through the long afternoons with a bottle of Petit-Sirah, clipping things from the newspaper, baking roasts and hams and pies enough for an army though she wouldn’t eat two bites herself and Willis, even with his appetite, couldn’t begin to make a dent in them, she couldn’t help pining, just a bit, for Lester Gaudinet and the lilting breathy rhapsody of his saxophone, and she couldn’t help feeling that at sixty-eight, life had begun to pass her by.

It was a close brooding morning in late September, and Willis was up at six, as usual, washing last night’s dishes, sweeping up, sneaking a half-eaten leg of lamb coated with a greenish fluorescent fuzz into the trash. He fetched the newspaper from the front lawn and was about to sit down over a cup of coffee and a slice of toast when he discovered that they were out of Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread. Each morning for her breakfast, which Willis prepared with care and trepidation before hurrying off to the job site, Muriel had two slices, lightly toasted and dry, of Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread with a two-minute, twenty-seven-second egg, six ounces of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice and three thimble-sized cups of espresso. If she was difficult in the evening, when all he wanted was to collapse in front of the TV with a tall scotch and water, she was impossible in the morning, crawling out of the blood-red cave of her insomniac’s sleep like a lioness poked with a stick, and he’d long since learned the survival value of presenting her with the placebo of a flawless breakfast. Willis squinted in vain into the cavernous depths of the breadbox and understood that he had a full-blown crisis on his hands.

A sunless dawn was breaking beyond the windows and it filled the kitchen with a sick hopeless light. For a moment Willis stood there at the counter, gaping round him as if he didn’t recognize the place, and then he got hold of himself and fastened on the thought of the twenty-four-hour Quick-Stop on the corner. Would they have it? Not a chance, he decided, mentally browsing the bright but niggardly shelves — beer they had, yes, cigarettes, pornographic magazines, candy, videotape, gum — but who needed bread? He could already picture the six stale loaves of Wonder bread stiffening in their wrappers, but he fished his Mets cap out of the closet, stepped out the front door and crossed the dewy lawn to the car, figuring he had nothing to lose.

Outside, as he stood fumbling with the keys at the door of Muriel’s car — they called it Muriel’s car because she’d insisted on buying the thing though she’d been raised in the city and had never been behind the wheel of a car in her life — he was struck by something in the air. What was it? There was a raw smell of the ocean, much stronger than usual, and the atmosphere seemed to brood over him, heavy, damp, the pull and tug of a thousand tiny fingers. And the birds — where were the birds? There was no sound except for the rattle of a truck out on the highway … but then he really didn’t have time to dawdle and smell the breeze and linger over the little mysteries of life like some loopy-eyed kid on his way to school, and he ducked into the car, fired up the mufflerless engine with a roar and shriek that set every dog in the neighborhood howling — and there was noise now, noise to spare — and rumbled up the road for the Quick-Stop.

The man behind the counter gave a violent start when Willis stepped through the door but relaxed almost immediately — the store had been robbed once or twice a week for as long as Willis could remember, and he supposed they had a right to be nervous. He shuffled up to the counter, patting his pockets unconsciously to locate his wallet, keys and checkbook, and said, “Bread?” making a question of it. The clerk was small, slight, dark-skinned, and he peered up at Willis in mute incomprehension, as if he’d been speaking another language, which in fact he had: Willis didn’t know what the man was — Pakistani, Puerto Rican or Pathan — but it was apparent that English was not his first language. “Pan?” Willis tried, tossing out a nugget of the Spanish he’d picked up in Texas during the war. The man stared at him out of deep-set eyes. He must have been twenty-one — he’d have to be to work here — but to Willis, from the perspective of his accumulating years, the man was a boy, absurdly young, twelve, ten years old, a baby. The boy/man raised a languid arm and pointed, and Willis moved off in the direction indicated. Pasta, kitty litter, nachos … and there it was, sure enough — bread, sandwiched between the suntan oil and disposable diapers. A sad little collection of hot-dog buns, pita bread, tortillas and a single fortified nut loaf greeted him: there was no Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread. What did he expect, miracles?

When he shuffled back into the kitchen, running late now, the fortified nut loaf tucked like a football under his arm, he had a shock: Muriel was up. There were telltale traces of her on the counter, at the door of the refrigerator and on the base of the coffeemaker. He saw where yesterday’s grounds had been flung at the trash can and dribbled down the wall behind it, saw where she’d set her cup down on the stove and where she’d torn through the cabinet in search of her pills and artificial sweetener; in the same moment the muted rumble of the TV came to him from the next room. He was fumbling with the espresso machine, hurrying, the framers due at seven-thirty and the plumber at eight, when she appeared in the doorway.

Muriel’s face composed itself around the point of her Scotch-Irish nose and the tight little pout of her stingy lips. She was short and busty, and the tips of her toes peeked out from beneath the hem of her nightgown. “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.

He turned to the stove. A jolt of pain shot through his hips — there was weather coming, he could feel it. “We were out of bread, sweetie,” he said, presenting the side of his face to her as he spooned the eggs from their shells. “I had to go down to the Quick-Stop.”

This seemed to placate her, and she subsided into the living room and huddled over her coffee mug in front of the TV screen. Willis could see the TV from the kitchen, where he popped the toast, brewed the espresso and squeezed the oranges. A chirpy woman with a broad blond face and hair that might have been spun sugar was chirping something about weight loss and a new brand of cracker made from seaweed. Willis arranged Muriel’s things on a tray and brought them in to her.

She gave him a hard look as he set the tray down on the coffee table, but then she smiled and grabbed his arm to pull his face down, peck him a kiss and tell him how much he spoiled her. “Got to go, sweetie,” he murmured, already backing away, already thinking of the car, the road, the house by the ocean that was rising before his eyes like a dream made concrete.

“You’ll be home for lunch?”

“Yes, sweetie,” he murmured, and then he made a fatal miscalculation: he lingered there before the glowing ball of the TV. The weatherman, in a silly suit and bow tie and mugging like a shill, had replaced the chirping confection of a woman, and Willis lingered — he’d smelled the weather on the air and felt it in his hips, and he was briefly curious. After all, he was going to be out in it all day long.

It was at that moment that Muriel’s cry rose up out of the depths of the couch as from the ringside seats at a boxing match — harsh, querulous, the voice of disbelief and betrayal. “And what do you call this?” she boomed, nullifying the weatherman, his maps and pointers and satellite photos, the TV itself.

“What, sweetie?” Willis managed, his voice a small scuttling thing receding into its hole. The windows were gray. The weatherman blathered about wind velocity and temperature readings.

“This, this toast.“

“They didn’t have your bread, sweetie, and Waldbaum’s won’t be open for another hour yet—”

“You son of a bitch.” Suddenly she was on her feet, red-faced and panting for breath. “Didn’t I tell you I wanted to go shopping last night? Didn’t I tell you I needed things?”

They’d been together for two years now, and Willis knew there was no reasoning with her, not at this hour, not before she’d had her eggs and toast, not before she’d been sedated by the parade of game shows and soap operas that marched relentlessly through her mornings. All he could do was slump his shoulders penitently and edge toward the door.

But she anticipated him, darting furiously at him and crying, “That’s right, leave me, go on off to work and leave me here, you son of a bitch!” She was in a mood, she could do anything, he knew it, and he shrank away from her as she changed course suddenly, jerked back from him and snatched up the breakfast tray in an explosion of crockery, cutlery and searing black liquid. “Toast!” she shrieked. “You call this toast!?” And then, as he watched in horror, the tray itself sailed across the room like a heat-seeking missile, sure and swift, dodging the lamp and coasting over the crest of the couch to discover its inevitable target in the grinning, winking, pointer-wielding image of the weatherman.

Later, after Willis had gone off to work and Muriel had had a chance to calm herself and reflect on the annihilation of the TV and the espresso stains on the rug, she felt ashamed and repentant. She’d let her nerves get the better of her and she was wrong, she’d be the first to admit it. And not only that, but who had she hurt but herself — it was like murdering her only friend, cutting herself off from the world like a nun in a convent — worse: at least a nun had her prayers. The repairman — in her grief and confusion she very nearly dialed 911, and she was so distraught when she finally got through to him that he was there before a paramedic would even have got his jacket on — the repairman told her it was hopeless. The picture tube was shot and the best thing to do was just go out to Caldor and buy herself a new set, and then he named half-a-dozen Japanese brands and she lost control all over again. She’d be goddamned and roasted three times over in hell before she’d ever buy anything from a Jap after what they did to her brother in the war and what was he, the repairman, an American or what? Didn’t he know how they laughed at us, the Japs? He hit his van on the run and didn’t look back.

It was 10:00 A.M. Willis was at work, the weather was rotten and she was missing “Hollywood Squares” and couldn’t even salve her hurt with the consolation of shopping — not till Willis came home, anyway. God, he was such a baby, she thought as she sat there at the kitchen table over a black and bitter cup of espresso. He’d been a real mess when she’d met him — the last wife had squeezed him like a dishrag and hung him out to dry. His clothes were filthy, he was drunk from morning till night, he’d been fired from his last three jobs and the car he was driving was like a coffin on wheels. She’d made a project of him. She’d rescued him, given him a home and clean underwear and hankies, and if he thanked her a hundred times a day it wouldn’t be enough. If she kept the reins tight, it was because she had to. Let him go — even for an hour — and he’d come home three days later stinking of gin and vomit.

The house was silent as a tomb. She gazed out the window; the clouds hung low and roiled over the roof, strung out like sausage, like entrails, black with blood and bile. There was a storm watch on, she’d heard that much on the “Morning” show, and again she felt a tug of regret over the TV. She wanted to get up that minute and turn on the news channel, but the news channel was no more — not for her, at any rate. There was the radio — and she experienced a sudden sharp stab of nostalgia for her girlhood and the nights when the whole family would crowd around the big Emerson console and listen to one program after another — but these days she never listened; it just gave her a headache. And with Willis around, who needed another headache?

She thought of the newspaper then and pushed herself up from the table to poke through the living room for it — if there was anything serious, a hurricane or something, they’d have a story on the front page. She was thinking about that, fixating on the newspaper, and she forgot all about the TV, so that when she stepped through the door, the sight of it gave her a shock. She’d swept up the broken glass, feeling chastened and heartbroken, but now the shattered screen accused her all over again. Guiltily, she shuffled through the heap of papers and magazines stuffed under the coffee table, then poked through the bedroom and finally went outside to comb the front lawn. No newspaper. Of all days, Willis must have taken it to work with him. And suddenly, standing there on the hushed and gray lawn in her housecoat and slippers, she was furious again. The son of a bitch. He never thought of her, never. Now she had the whole drizzling black miserable day ahead of her — TV-less, friendless, joyless — and she didn’t even have the consolation of the newspaper.

While she was standing there out front of the house, poking halfheartedly under the bushes and noticing how shabby a job the gardener had done — and he’d hear from her, by god he would — a big brown UPS van glided into the driveway with a gentle sigh of the brakes. The driver was a young man, handsome, broad-shouldered, and for a minute she had a vision of Lester Gaudinet as he was all those many years ago. Lester Gaudinet. And where was he now? God knew if he was even alive still … but how she’d like to see him, wouldn’t that be something?

“Mrs. Willis Blythe?” The man had crossed the lawn and he stood at her elbow now, a parcel tucked under his arm.

“Yes,” she said, and the wind came up and took her hair out of its bun.

The man held out a clipboard to her, pages flapping. “Sign here,” he said, handing her a pen, and she saw a list of names and signatures and the big red X he’d scrawled beside the space for her name.

She took the clipboard from him and smiled up into his sea-green eyes, into Lester’s eyes, and she couldn’t help trying to hold on to the moment. “Rotten day,” she said.

He looked tense, anxious, looked as if he were about to lunge out of the blocks and disappear down a cinder track. “Hurricane weather,” he said. “Supposed to miss us except for some rain later on — that’s what the radio says, anyway.”

She held the clipboard in her hand still and she bent forward to sign the form, but then a thought occurred to her and she straightened up again. “Hurricanes,” she said with a little snort of contempt. “And I suppose it’s called Bill or Fred or something like that — not like in the old days, when they had the sense to name them after women. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

The UPS man was shuffling his feet on the spongy carpet of the lawn. “Yeah,” he said, “sure — but would you sign, please, ma’am? I’ve got—”

She held up her hand to forestall him. God, he was handsome — the image of Lester. Of course, Lester had the mustache and he was taller and his eyes were prettier, brighter somehow … “I know, I know — you’ve got a million deliveries to make.” She gave him a bright steady look. “It’s women that’re like hurricanes, they used to understand that”—was she flirting with him? Yes, of course she was—“but now it’s Hurricane Tom, Dick or Harry. It just makes you sick, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I know, but—”

“Okay, okay already, I’m signing.” She inscribed his delivery sheet for him in the neat geometric script she’d mastered in parochial school in another age and then turned her coquette’s smile on him — why not, was she so old it was impossible? Not in this world, not with the things that went on on TV these days. She touched his arm and held it a moment as he handed her the package. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re so handsome, do you know that?”

And then he stood there like an oaf, like a schoolboy, and he actually blushed. “Yes, yes,” he stammered, “I mean no, I mean thank you,” and then he was darting across the lawn with his clipboard flapping and the wind took her hair again. “Have a nice day!” she called, but he didn’t hear her.

Inside, she examined the package briefly—The Frinstell Corporation, the label read — and then she went into the sewing room to fetch her scissors. The Frinstell Corporation, she thought, running it over in her mind, and what was this all about? She was forever clipping things out of magazines and sending away for them — once-in-a-lifetime offers and that sort of thing — but Frinstell didn’t ring a bell. It took her a moment, the scissors gleaming dully in the crepuscular light of the kitchen, and then she had the tape slit up the seam and she was digging through the welter of tissue paper stuffed inside. And there — oh yes, of course — there was her genuine U.S.-Weather-Service-Approved Home Weather Center mounted on a genuine polished-walnut veneer plaque — thermometer, barometer and humidity gauge all in one — with a lifetime guarantee.

It was a pretty sort of thing, she thought, holding it up to admire it. Polished brass, good bold figures and hash marks you didn’t need binoculars to read, made in the U.S. of A. It would look nice up on the wall over the fireplace — or maybe in the dining room; the walnut would match the color of the dining set, wouldn’t it? She was on her way into the dining room, the genuine Home Weather Center in hand, when she noticed that the barometer needle was stuck all the way down in the left-hand corner. Pinned. She shook it, patted the glass lens. Nothing. It was stuck fast.

Suddenly she couldn’t help herself — she could feel the rage coming up on her, a rage as inevitable and relentless as the smashing of the sea on the rocks — and how many pills had she swallowed and how many doctors, not to mention husbands, had tried to quell it? The Frinstell Corporation. Cheats and con artists, that’s what they were. You couldn’t get anything anymore that wasn’t a piece of junk and no wonder America was the laughingstock of the world. Not ten seconds out of the box and it was garbage already. She was seething. It was all she could do to keep from smashing it against the wall, stamping it underfoot — dope addicts, hopheads, the factories were full of them — but then she remembered the TV and she held on till the first hot wave of fury passed over her.

All right, she would be rational about it, she would. It had a lifetime guarantee, didn’t it? But what a joke, she thought bitterly, and again she had to restrain herself from flinging the thing into the wall — a glass of wine, that’s what she needed. Yes. To calm her. And then she’d wrap the thing up in the box and send it right back to the bastards — they’d see how fast their own shit came sailing back to them, they’d see whether they could put anything over on her … she’d have Willis down at the post office the minute he came in the door. And she’d be damned if she’d pay postage on it either. Return to Sender, that’s how she’d mark it. Damaged in Transit, Take Your Garbage and—

But then she glanced up at the clock. It was quarter to twelve already and he’d be home any minute now. Suddenly all the rage she’d generated over the Frinstell Corporation was gone, extinguished as quickly as it had arisen, and she felt a wild rush of affection for her man, her husband, for Willis — the poor guy, out there in all kinds of weather, working like a man half his age, providing for her and protecting her … and she’d been hard on him at breakfast, she had. What he needed was a nice lunch, she decided, a nice hot lunch. She set the Home Weather Center back in the box as gently as if she were lowering a baby into its crib, and then she wrapped the package up again, retaped the seams, and went to the cupboard. She poured herself a glass of wine from the jug and then fastened on a can of split-pea-and-ham soup — she’d heat that for Willis, and she’d make him a nice egg salad on toast….

Toast. But they were out of bread, weren’t they? There was nothing but that sawdust-and-nut crap he’d tried to pawn off on her for breakfast. She thought about that for a moment and a black cloud seemed to rise up before her. And then, before she knew it, the fury of the morning swept over her again, the tragedy of the TV and the cheat of the Home Weather Center doubling it and redoubling it, and by the time she heard Willis’s key turn in the lock, she was smoldering like Vesuvius.

If she was testy in the morning, if she lashed into him for no reason and jumped down his throat at the slightest provocation, by lunchtime she was inevitably transformed, so that an all-embracing cloud of maternal sweetness wrapped him up as he stepped through the door, and then ushered him out again, half an hour later, with a series of tender lingering hugs, squeezes and back pats. That was the usual scenario, but today was different. Willis sensed it even before he shambled down the hallway to discover her in the kitchen fussing over a can of soup and a box of saltines. He saw that she was still in her nightdress and housecoat, a bad sign, and he recognized the stunned, hurt, put-upon look in her eyes. He just stood there at the kitchen door and waited.

“Willis, oh, Willis,” she sighed — or no, moaned, bleated, wailed as if all the trials of Job had been visited on her in the five hours since he’d seen her last. He knew the tone and knew it was trouble — anything could have set her off, from a stopped-up drain to the war in Bosnia or teary memories of her first husband, the saint. “Honey,” she cried, crossing the room to catch him up in an embrace so fierce it nearly ruptured his kidneys, “you’ve got to help me out — just a little favor, a tiny little one.” Her voice hardened almost imperceptibly as she clung to him and swayed back and forth in a kind of dance of grief: “Everything is just so, so rotten.“

He was seventy-five years old and he’d been working since the day he climbed out of the cradle. Most men his age were dead. He was tired. His hips felt as if an army of mad acupuncturists had been driving hot needles into them. All he wanted was to sit down.

“Honey, here,” she said, cooing now, nothing but concern,’and she led him awkwardly to the table, still half-clinging to him. “Sit down and eat; poor man, you’re probably starved. And exhausted, too. Is it raining out there?”

It was a question that didn’t require an answer, a variant on her luncheon monologue, a diversion to distract him from the true subject at hand, the crisis, whatever it was — the shattered TV screen, was that it? — the crisis which required his immediate attention and expertise. And no, it wasn’t raining, not yet, but it was blowing like holy hell out there and his morning had been an unmitigated disaster, a total waste of time. The framers hadn’t showed — or the damn plumber, either — and he’d spent the whole moming in the skeleton of the house, which was already behind schedule, watching the wind whip the waves to a froth and batter the seawall as if it were made of cardboard instead of concrete. He’d called the sons of bitches five or six times from the pay phone out front of the bank, but they weren’t answering. Pups, that’s what they were, afraid of a little weather. He glanced up and the soup appeared on the table before him, along with a platter of sardines, six neat squares of cheddar, saltines, and a glass of apple juice. Muriel hovered over him.

He took a sip of the juice, fingered his spoon and set it down again. Why forestall the inevitable? “What’s the trouble, sweetie?” he asked.

“I know you’re not going to like this, but you’re going to have to go to the post office for me.”

“The post office?” He didn’t want to go to the post office — he wanted to get back to the torn earth and wooden vertebrae of the rising house, to the mounds of rubble and refuse and the hot sudden smell of roofing tar. He thought of the doctor and his wife who’d hired him, a young couple in their forties, building their dream house by the sea. He’d promised them fifty-five hundred square feet with balconies, sundeck and wraparound view in six months’ time — and here two months had gone by already and the damn frame wasn’t even up yet. And Muriel wanted him to go to the post office.

“It’s the Home Weather Center,” she said. “It’s got to go back. And I mean today, immediately, right now.” Her voice threatened to ignite. “I won’t have it here in the house another minute … if those bastards think they can—”

She was working herself up, her ire directed for the moment at the Home Weather Center, whatever that was, and the unnamed bastards, whoever they were, but he knew that if he didn’t watch himself, if he didn’t look sharp, the full weight of her outrage would shift to him with the sudden killing swiftness of an avalanche. He heard himself saying, “I’ll take care of it, sweetie, don’t you worry.”

But when he glanced up to gauge her reaction, he found he was talking to himself: she’d left the room. Now what? There were sounds from the dining room — a fierce rending of tape and an impatient rustle of tissue paper, followed by the sharp tattoo of her approaching footsteps — and before he could lift the spoon to his lips she was back with a cardboard box the size of an ottoman. She swept across the room and dropped it on the table with a percussive thump that jarred the soup bowl and sent the juice swirling round the rim of the glass. Outside, the wind howled at the windows.

“Just look at this, will you?” she was saying, her elbows leaping as she tore the package open and extracted a long slim wooden plaque with three gleaming gauges affixed to it. He had a moment of enlightenment: the weather center. “Did you ever see such junk in your life?”

It looked all right to him. He wanted soup, he wanted sleep, he wanted the doctor’s house to rise up out of the dunes and bravely confront the sea, perfect in every detail. “What’s wrong with it, sweetie?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Her voice jumped an octave. “Are you blind? Look at this”—a blunt chewed fingernail stabbed at the middle gauge—“that’s what’s wrong. Junk. Nothing but junk.”

He frowned over the thing while his soup got cold and then he fished his glasses out of his shirt pocket and studied it. The barometer needle was pinned all the way down at twenty-eight inches — he’d never seen anything like it. He lifted the plaque from the table and shook it. He inverted it. He tapped the glass. Nothing.

Muriel was seething. She went off into a tirade about con men, cheats, the Japanese and what they’d done to her brother, not to mention the American economy, and all he could do to calm her was agree with everything she said and croon “sweetie” over and over again till his soup turned gelid and he pushed himself up from the table, tucked the package under his arm, and headed out the door for the post office.

The wind was up, whipping the treetops like rags, and the smell of the ocean was stronger now, rank and enveloping, as if the bottom of the sea had turned over and littered the shore with its dead. A trash can skittered down the street and a shopping bag shot across the lawn to cling briefly to his ankles. As he settled into the car, the package beside him, the wind jerked the door out of his hand and he began to realize that there would be no more work today. At this rate he’d be lucky if what they’d put up so far was still there in the morning. No wonder the framers hadn’t showed: this was a real blow.

He dodged trash-can lids and branches that glided magically across the road, the car pulling him along to the post office as faithfully as an old horse. The streets were deserted. He encountered exactly three other cars, all with their lights on and all going like hell. By the time he got to the traffic light outside the post office and sat there for an eternity watching the stoplight heave on its wires, it was so dark it might have been dusk. Maybe it was a hurricane after all, he thought, maybe that was it. He would have turned on the radio, but the damn thing had never worked to begin with, and then, two months ago, some jerk had smashed out the window on the driver’s side and made off with it.

Sitting there watching the stoplight leap and sway over the deserted pavement, he felt a sudden sense of foreboding, a quick hot jolt of fear that made him gun the engine impatiently and inch forward into the intersection. He was thinking he’d better get home and see to the windows, see to Muriel — he’d been caught in a hurricane in Corpus Christi once and they’d been without lights or water for six days. He remembered an old woman sitting in the middle of a flooded street with a bloody strip of somebody’s parlor curtains knotted round her head. That was an image. And he and his buddies with two cases of tequila they’d fished out of the wreckage of a liquor store. He’d better get home. He’d better.

But then the light changed and he figured he was here already and might as well take care of business — there’d be hell to pay at home if he didn’t, hurricane or no — and he pulled into the lot, parked the car and reached for the package. Five minutes, that’s all it would take. Then he’d be home.

As he came up the walk — and it was blowing now, Jesus, dirt or sand or something in his eyes — he saw the postmaster and a bearded guy with a ponytail scurrying around with a sheet of plywood big enough to seal off a shopping mall. The postmaster had a hammer in his hand and he was shouting something to the other one, but then a gust took hold of the plywood and sent them both sprawling into the bushes. Willis hunched himself over and snatched at the Mets cap, but it was too late: it shot from his head and sailed up over the trees like a clay pigeon. Hurrying now, he fought his way through the heavy double doors and into the post office.

There was no one at the counter, no one waiting in line, no one in the building at all as far as he could see. The lights were all up full and the polished floor ran on down the corridor as usual, but the place was eerily silent. Outside, the sky raged at the plate-glass windows, a wild spatter of rain driving before it now. Willis hit the handbell, just to be sure no one was back there in the sorting room or on the toilet or something, and then he turned to go. Muriel would have to understand, that was all: they were closed down. There was a hurricane coming. He’d done all he could.

He’d just pulled back the inner door when the big plate-glass window in the lobby gave way with a pop like a champagne cork, followed by the splash of shattering glass. Leave the damn package, his brain told him, drop it and get on home and lock yourself up in the basement with Muriel and the cat and a case of pork and beans, but his legs failed him. He just stood there as a window shattered somewhere in the back and the lights faltered and then blew. “Hey, you, old man!” a voice was shouting, and there was the postmaster, right beside him, his face drawn and white, hair disheveled. The bearded man was with him and their eyes were jumping with excitement. In the next moment they had Willis by the arms, wind screaming in his ears; a flurry of white envelopes lifted suddenly into the air, and he was moving, moving fast, down a hallway and into the darkness and the quiet.

He could smell the postmaster and the other one, could smell the wet and the fear on them. Their breath came in quick greedy pants. Outside, way in the distance, he could hear the muted keening of the wind.

“Anybody got a match?” It was the postmaster’s voice, a voice he knew from the roped-off line and the window and the gleaming tiled expanse of the lobby.

“Here,” came another voice and a match flared to reveal the pockmarked face of the bearded man and a cement-block storage room of some kind, mail-bags, cardboard boxes, heaps of paper.

The postmaster fumbled through a cabinet behind him and came up with a flashlight, one of those big boxy jobs with a lighthouse beam at one end and a little red emergency light at the other. He played it round the room, then set the flashlight down on a carton and cut the beam. The room glowed with an eerie reddish light. “Holy shit,” he said, “did you see the way that window blew? You didn’t get cut, did you, Bob?”

Bob answered in the negative.

“Man, we were lucky.” The postmaster was a big bearish man in his fifties who’d worn a beard for years but now had the pasty stubbly look of a man newly acquainted with a razor. He paused. The wind screamed in the distance. “God, I wonder if Becky’s okay — she was supposed to take Jimmy to the dentist, to the orthodontist, I mean—”

Bob said nothing, but then both of them turned to Willis, as if they’d just realized he was there.

“You okay?” the postmaster asked him.

“I’m all right,” Willis said. He was, wasn’t he? But what about the car? What about Muriel? “But listen, I’ve got to get home—”

The postmaster let out a little bark of a laugh. “Home? Don’t you get it? That’s Hurricane Leroy out there — you’ll be lucky if you got a home left to go to — and whatever possessed you to come out in this mess? I mean, don’t you listen to the TV? Christ,” he said, as if that summed it all up.

There was a silence, and then, with a sigh, Bob eased himself back into a cradle of folded cardboard boxes. “Well,” he said, and the faint red light glinted off the face of the pint bottle he extracted from his shirt, “we might as well enjoy ourselves — looks like we’re going to be here a while.”

Willis must have dozed. They’d passed the bottle and he’d got a good deep burning taste of whiskey — a taste Muriel denied him; she was worse than the Schick Center when it came to that, though she sipped wine all day herself — and then Bob had begun to drone on in a stopped-up, back-of-the-throat sort of voice, complaining about his marriage, his bad back, his sister on welfare and the way the cat sprayed the bedposts and the legs of the kitchen table, and Willis had found it increasingly difficult to focus on the glowing red beacon of the light. He was slouched over in a folding chair the postmaster had dragged in from one of the offices, and when awareness gripped him, Bob was enumerating the tragic flaws of the auto-insurance industry, his face ghastly in the hellish light. For a moment Willis didn’t know where he was, but then he heard the wind in the distance and it all came back to him.

“With only two accidents, Bob? I can’t believe it,” the postmaster said.

“Hell,” Bob countered, “I’ll show you the damn bill.”

Willis tried to get up but his hips wouldn’t allow it. “Muriel,” he said.

The two faces turned to him then, the bearded one and the one that should have been bearded, and they looked strange and menacing in that unnatural light. “You all right, old-timer?” the postmaster asked.

Willis felt like Rip Van Winkle, like Methuselah; he felt tired and hopeless, felt as if everything he’d known and done in his life had been wasted. “I’ve got to”—he caught himself; he’d been about to say I’ve got to go home, but they’d probably try to stop him and he didn’t want any arguments. “I’ve got to take a leak,” he said.

The postmaster studied him a moment. “It’s still blowing out there,” he said, “but the radio says the worst of it’s past.” Willis heard the faint whisper of the radio then — one of those little transistors the kids all wear; it was tucked into the postmaster’s breast pocket. “Give it another hour,” the postmaster said, “and we’ll make sure you get home all right. And your car’s okay, if that’s what’s worrying you. Nothing worse than maybe a branch on the roof.”

Willis said nothing.

“Down the hall and to your left,” the postmaster said.

It took him a moment to fight the inertia of his hips, and then he was emerging from the shadows of the storage room and into the somber gray twilight of the hallway. Nuggets of glass crunched and skittered underfoot and everything was wet. It was raining hard outside and there was that rank smell in the air still, but the wind seemed to have tapered off. He found the toilet and he kept on going.

The lobby was a mess of wet clinging paper and leaves, but the doors swung open without a hitch, and in the next moment Willis was out on the front steps and the rain was driving down with a vengeance on his bare bald head. He reached automatically for the Mets cap, but then he remembered it was gone, and he hunched his shoulders and started off across the parking lot. He moved cautiously, wary of the slick green welter of leaves and windblown debris underfoot, and he was wet through by the time he reached the car. A single crippled branch was draped over the windshield, but there was no damage; he swept it to the ground and ducked into the driver’s seat.

His mind wasn’t working well at this point — perhaps it was the shock of the storm or the effects of the whiskey and his nap in the folding chair. The keys. He fumbled twice through his pants and jacket before he finally found them, and then he flooded the engine and had to hold his foot to the floor while the starter whined and the rain smeared the windshield. Finally he got the thing going with a roar and jerked it into gear; it was then that he discovered the tree blocking the exit. And now what? The specter of Muriel rose before him, pale and trembling, and then he glanced up to see the postmaster and Bob planted on the steps and gawking at him as if he’d just dropped down from another planet. What the hell, he thought, and he gave them a jaunty wave, revved the engine and shot up over the curb and into the street.

But here the world was truly transformed. It was as if a big hand had swept the street, slapping down trees and telephone poles, obliterating windows, stripping shingles from the roofs. The road that led out to the highway was impassable, churning with shit-brown water and one of those little Japanese cars awash in it, overturned on its roof. Willis tried Meridian Street and then Seaboard, but both were blocked. An oak tree that must have been five hundred years old had taken the veranda out of the house where Joe Diggs had lived before he passed on, and there were live wires thrashing the shattered shaft of a telephone pole out front. Even through the tattoo of the rain on the roof Willis could hear the sirens, a continuous, drawn-out wail of grief.

He was worried now — this was as bad as Corpus Christi, worse — and his hands trembled on the wheel when he turned into his own street and found the entrance buried in rubble and vegetation. The house on the corner — the Needlemans’—was untouched, but across the street, on his side, the Stovers’ place had lost its roof. And the street itself, the placid tree-lined street that had attracted Muriel in the first place, was unrecognizable, a double row of maples laid down flat like a deck of cards. Willis backed out of the street, water running up to his hubcaps, and made a left on Susan and then another left on Massapequa, trying to make it around the block and come up on the house from the far side.

He was in luck. Neither street seemed to have suffered much damage, and he was able to make his way round a fallen telephone pole at the entrance to Massapequa by climbing up over the curb as he’d done at the post office. And then he was turning into Laurel, his own street, dodging refuse and swinging wide to avoid the clogged storm drain at the corner. People were out on their lawns now, assessing the damage — he saw Mrs. Tilden or Tillotson or whatever her name was trying to brace up a cypress that clung to her front porch like a wet mustache. It was almost comical, that little woman and that big limp tree, and he began to relax — everything was going to be okay, it was, there was hardly any damage on this end — and there was the fat guy — what was his name? — holding his head and dancing round the carcass of his crushed Cadillac. Yes, he said aloud, everything’s going to be all right, and he repeated it to himself, making a little prayer of it.

He was more afraid of Muriel now than of the storm — he could hear her already: how could he leave her in the middle of a hurricane? Where had he been? Was that liquor on his breath? The damage he could take care of — he was a builder, wasn’t he? It was just a matter of materials, that was all — bricks, lumber, drywall, shingles. And glass. The glaziers would be busy, that was for sure. As he eased past a lawn mower standing forlornly in the middle of the street and crept round the big sweeping curve that gave him his first view of the house, he was expecting the worst — shutters gone, a hole in the roof, the elm lying atop the garage like a crippled beast — but the reality made his heart seize.

There was nothing there. Nothing. Where the house had stood not two hours ago, the elm towering over it, the two-car garage in back with his tools and workbench and all the rest, there was now a vacant lot. The yard had been swept clean but for the torn and crenellated foundation, filled with rubble like some ancient ruin. Panic seized him, shock, and he hit the brake instinctively, sending the car into a fishtail that carried him across the street and slammed him into the curb with a jolt.

Trembling, he pried his fingers from the wheel. There was a throb of pain above his right eye where he’d hit the rearview mirror. His hands were shaking. But no, he thought, looking up again, it couldn’t be. He was on the wrong street, that was it — he’d got turned around and fetched up in front of somebody else’s place. It took him a moment, but then he swung the door open and stepped tentatively into the litter of the street, and there was the number on the curb to refute him, there the mailbox with his name stenciled across it in neat white letters, untouched, the red flag still standing tall. And that was the Novaks’ place next door, no doubt about it, a sick lime green with pink trim….

Then he thought of Muriel. Muriel. She was, she was … he couldn’t form the thought, and he staggered across the lawn like a drunk to stand gaping into that terrible hole in the ground. “Muriel,” he bleated, “Muriel!” and the rain drove down at him.

He stood there a long while, head bowed, feeling as old as the stones themselves, as old as the gashed earth and the dead gray sky. And then, the car still rumbling and stuttering behind him, he had the very first intimation of a thought that sparked and swelled till it glowed like a torch in his brain: Dewar’s and water. He saw himself as he was when Muriel first found him, wedded to the leatherette stool at the Dew Drop Inn, and his lips formed the words involuntarily: “Make mine a Dewar’s and water.” The house was gone, but he’d lost houses before — mainly to wives, which were a sort of natural disaster anyway; that he could live with — and he’d lost wives, too, but never like this.

It hit him then, a wave of grief that started in his hips and crested in his throat: Muriel. He saw her vividly, the lunchtime Muriel who rubbed his shoulders and fussed over him, making those little crackers with anchovy paste and avocado … he saw her turning down the sheets on the bed at night, saw her frowning over a crossword puzzle, the glasses perched on the end of her nose — little things, homey things. With a pang he remembered the way she’d kid him over the TV programs or a football game and how she’d dance round the kitchen with a bottle of wine and a beef brisket studded with cloves of garlic … and now it was over. He was seventy-five — seventy-six, come October — and he stared into that pit and felt the icy breath of eternity on his face.

His jacket was wet through and his arms hung limp at his sides by the time he turned away and limped back over the sodden lawn, a soldier returning from the wars. He dragged himself across the street to the car, and all he could think of was Ted Casselman, down at the Dew Drop — he would know what to do — and he actually had the door open, one foot poised on the rocker panel, when he glanced up for a final bewildered look, and a movement on the Novaks’ porch caught his eye. All at once the storm door swung back with a dull flash of light and there she was, Muriel, rescued from oblivion. She was in her housecoat still and it was bedraggled and wet, and her long white hair hung tangled round her shoulders so that she was like some old woman of the woods in a children’s tale. Anna Novak hovered behind her, a tragic look pressed into the immobile Slavic folds of her eyes. Muriel just stood there, gazing across the street to where he hovered at the door of the car, half a beat from release.

The wind came up then and rattled the branches of the trees that were still standing. Someone was calling a dog up the street: “Hermie, Hermie! Here, baby!” The rain slackened. “Willis!” Muriel suddenly cried, “Willis!” and the spell was broken. She was coming down the steps, grand and invincible, her arms spread wide.

What could he do? He dropped his foot to the pavement” ignoring the pain that shot through his hip, and opened his arms to receive her.

(1989)

HOPES RISE

I took my aching back to my brother-in-law, the doctor, and he examined me, ran some X-rays, and then sat me down in his office. Gazing out the window on the early manifestations of spring — inchoate buds crowning the trees, pussy willows at the edge of the marsh, the solitary robin probing the stiff yellow grass — I felt luxurious and philosophical. So what if my back felt as if it had been injected with a mixture of battery acid and Louisiana hot sauce? There was life out there, foliate and rich, a whole planet seething with possibility. It was spring, time to wake up and dance to the music of life.

My brother-in-law had finished fiddling with his unfashionable beard and pushing his reading glasses up and down the bridge of his nose. He cleared his throat. “Listen, Peter,” he said in his mellifluous healing tones, “we’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we?”

A hundred corny jokes flew to my lips, but I just smiled and nodded.

“We’re close, right?”

I reminded him that he was married to my sister and had fathered my niece and nephew.

“Well, all right,” he said. “Now that that’s been established, I think I can reveal to you the first suppressed axiom of the medical cabal.”

I leaned forward, a fierce pain gripping the base of my spine, like a dog shaking a rat in its teeth. Out on the lawn, the robin beat its shabby wings and was sucked away on the breeze.

My brother-in-law held the moment, and then, enunciating with elaborate care, he said, “Any injury you sustain up to the age of twenty-one, give or take a year, is better the next day; after twenty-one, any injury you sustain will haunt you to the grave.”

I gave a hoot of laughter that made the imaginary dog dig his claws in, and then, wincing with the pain, I said, “And what’s the second?”

He was grinning at me, showing off the white, even, orthodontically assisted marvel of his teeth. “Second what?”

“Axiom. Of the medical cabal.”

He waved his hand. It was nothing. “Oh, that,” he said, pushing at his glasses. “Well, that’s not suppressed really, not anymore. I mean, medical men of the past have told their wives, children, brother-in-laws — or is it brothers-in-law? Anyway, it’s ‘Get plenty of rest and drink plenty of fluids.’”

This time my laugh was truncated, cut off like the drop of a guillotine. “And my back?”

“Get plenty of rest,” he said, “and drink plenty of fluids.”

The pain was there, dulling a bit as the dog relaxed its grip, but there all the same. “Can we get serious a minute?”

But he wouldn’t allow it. He never got serious. If he got serious he’d have to admit that half the world was crippled, arthritic, suffering from dysplasia and osteoporosis; he’d have to admit that there were dwarves and freaks and glandular monsters, not to mention the legions of bandy-legged children starving in the streets even as we spoke. If he got serious he’d have to acknowledge his yawning impotence in the face of the rot and chaos that were engulfing the world. He got up from his desk and led me to the door with a brother-in-lawly touch at the elbow.

I stood at the open door, the waiting room gaping behind me. I was astonished: he wasn’t going to do anything. Not a thing. “But, but,” I stammered, “aren’t you going to give me some pills at least?”

He held his flawless grin — not so much as a quiver of his bearded lip — and I had to love him for it: his back didn’t hurt; his knees were fine. “Peter,” he said, his voice rich with playful admonition, “there’s no magic pill — you should know that.”

I didn’t know it. I wanted codeine, morphine, heroin; I wanted the pain to go away. “Physician,” I hooted, “heal thyself!” And I swung round on my heels, surfeited with repartee, and nearly ran down a tiny wizened woman suspended like a spider in a gleaming web of aluminum struts and wheels and ratchets.

“You still seeing Adrian?” he called as I dodged toward the outer door. My coat — a jab of pain; my scarf — a forearm shiver. Then the gloves, the door, the wind, the naked cheat of spring. “Because I was thinking,” the man of healing called, “I was thinking we could do some doubles at my place”—thunderous crash of door, voice pinched with distance and the interposition of a plane of impermeable oak—“Saturday, maybe?”

At home, easing into my chair with a heating pad, I pushed the playback button on my answering machine. Adrian’s voice leapt out at me, breathless, wound up, shot through with existential angst and the low-threshold hum of day-to-day worry. “The frogs are disappearing. All over the world. Frogs. Can you believe it?” There was a pause. “They say they’re like the canary in the coal mine — it’s the first warning, the first sign. The apocalypse is here, it’s now, we’re doomed. Call me.”

Adrian and I had been seeing each other steadily for eleven years. We shopped together, went to movies, concerts, museums, had dinner three or four nights a week and talked for hours on the phone. In the early years, consumed by passion, we often spent the night together, but now, as our relationship had matured, we’d come increasingly to respect each other’s space. There’d been talk of marriage, too, in the early years — talk for the most part generated by parents, relatives and friends tied to mortgages and diaper services — but we felt we didn’t want to rush into anything, especially in a world hurtling toward ecological, fiscal and microbial disaster. The concept was still on hold.

I dialed her number and got her machine. I waited through three choruses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—her joke of the week — before I could leave my message, which was, basically, “I called; call me.” I was trying to think of a witty tag line when she picked up the phone. “Peter?”

“No, it’s Liberace risen from the dead.”

“Did you hear about the frogs?”

“I heard about the frogs. Did you hear about my back?”

“What did Jerry say?”

“’Get plenty of rest and drink plenty of fluids.’”

She was laughing on the other end of the line, a gurgle and snort that sounded like the expiring gasps of an emphysemic horse, a laugh that was all her own. Two days earlier I’d been carrying a box of old college books down to the basement when I tore everything there is to tear in the human back and began to wonder how much longer I’d need to hold on to my pristine copy of Agrarian Corsica, 900 B.C. to the Present. “I guess it must not be so bad, then,” she said, and the snorting and chuffing rose a notch and then fell off abruptly.

“Not so bad for you,” I said. “Or for Jerry. I’m the one who can’t even bend down to tie his shoes.”

“I’ll get you a pair of loafers.”

“You spoil me. You really do. Can you find them in frog skin?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “It’s not funny,” she said. “Frogs, toads and salamanders are vital to the food chain — and no jokes about frogs’ legs, please — and no one knows what’s happening to them. They’re just disappearing. Poof.”

I considered that a moment, disappearing frogs, especially as they related to my throbbing and ruined back. I pictured them — squat, long of leg, with extruded eyes and slick mucus-covered skin. I remembered stalking them as a boy with my laxly strung bow and blunt arrows, recalled the sound of the spring peepers and their clumsy attempts at escape, their limbs bound up in ropy strings of eggs. Frogs. Suddenly I was nostalgic: what kind of world would it be without them?

“I hope you’re not busy this weekend,” Adrian said.

“Busy?” My tone was guarded; a pulse of warning stabbed at my spine through its thin tegument of muscle fiber and skin. “Why?”

“I’ve already reserved the tickets.”

The sound of my breathing rattled in my ear. I wasn’t about to ask. I took a stoic breath and held it, awaiting the denouement.

“We’re going to a conference at NYU — the Sixth Annual International Herpetology and Batrachiology Conference….”

I shouldn’t have asked, but I did. “The what?”

“Snakes and frogs,” she said.

On Saturday morning we took the train into Manhattan. I brought along a book to thumb through on the way down — a tattered ancient tome called The Frog Book, which I’d found wedged in a corner of one of the denuded shelves of the Frog and Toad section at the local library. I wondered at all that empty space on the shelves and what it portended for the genuses and species involved. Apparently Adrian wasn’t the only one concerned with their headlong rush to extinction — either that, or the sixth grade had been assigned a report on amphibians. I wasn’t convinced, but I checked the book out anyway.

My back had eased up a bit — there was a low tightness and an upper constriction, but nothing like the knifing pain I’d been subjected to a few days earlier. As a precautionary measure I’d brought along a Naugahyde pillow to cushion my abused vertebrae against the jolts and lurches of the commuter train. Adrian slouched beside me, long legs askew, head bent in concentration over Mansfield Park, which she was rereading, by her own calculation, for the twenty-third time. She taught a course in the novels of Jane Austen at Bard, and I never really understood how she could tolerate reading the same books over and over again, semester after semester, year after year. It was like a prison sentence.

“Is that really your twenty-third time?”

She looked up. Her eyes were bright with the nuances of an extinguished world. “Twenty-fourth.”

“I thought you said twenty-third?”

“Reread. The first time doesn’t count as a reread — that’s your original read. Like your birthday — you live a year before you’re one.”

Her logic was irrefutable. I gazed out on the vast gray reaches of the frogless Hudson and turned to my own book: The explosive notè of the Green Frog proceeds from the shallow water; the purring trill of “the Tree Toad” comes from some spot impossible to locate. But listen! The toad’s lullaby note comes from the far margin, sweeter than all the others if we except the two notes in the chickadee’s spring call. We could never have believed it to be the voice of a toad if we had not seen and heard on that first May Day. I read about the love life of toads until we plunged into the darkness at Ninety-seventh Street, and then gave my eyes a rest. In the early days, Adrian and I would have traded witticisms and cutting portraits of our fellow passengers all the way down, but now we didn’t need to talk, not really. We were beyond talk.

It might have been one of those golden, delicately lit spring mornings invested with all the warmth and urgency of the season, bees hovering, buds unfolding, the air soft and triumphant, but it wasn’t. We took a cab down Park Avenue in a driving wintry rain and shivered our way up two flights of steps and into a drafty lecture hall where a balding man in a turtleneck sweater was holding forth on the molting habits of the giant Sumatran toad. I was feeling lighthearted — frogs and toads: I could hold this one over her head for a month; two, maybe — and I poked Adrian in the ribs at regular intervals over the course of the next two stultifyingly dull hours. We heard a monograph on the diet and anatomy of Discoglossus nigriventer, the Israeli painted frog, and another on the chemical composition of the toxin secreted by the poison-arrow frog of Costa Rica, but nothing on their chances of surviving into the next decade. Adrian pulled her green beret down over her eyebrows. I caught her stifling a yawn. After a while, my eyes began to grow heavy.

There was a dry little spatter of applause as the poison-arrow man stepped down from the podium, and it roused me from a morass of murky dreams. I rose and clapped feebly. I was just leaning into Adrian with the words “dim sum” on my lips, words that were certain to provoke her into action — it was past one, after all, and we hadn’t eaten — when a wild-looking character in blond dreadlocks and tinted glasses took hold of the microphone. “Greetings,” he said, his hoarse timbreless voice rustling through the speakers and an odd smile drifting across his lips. He was wearing a rumpled raincoat over a T-shirt that featured an enormous crouching toad in the act of flicking an insect into its mouth. The program identified him as B. Reid, of UC Berkeley. For a long moment he merely stood there, poised over the microphone, holding us with the blank gaze of his blue-tinted lenses.

Someone coughed. The room was so still I could hear the distant hiss of the rain.

“We’ve been privileged to hear some provocative and stimulating papers here this morning,” B. Reid began, and he hadn’t moved a muscle, save for his lips, “papers that have focused brilliantly on the minute and painstaking research crucial to our science and our way of knowledge, and I want to thank Professors Abercrombie and Wouzatslav for a job well done, but at the same time I want to ask you this: will there be a Seventh Annual International Herpetology and Batrachiology Conference? Will there be an eighth? Will there be a discipline, will there be batrachiologists? Ladies and gentlemen, why play out a charade here: will there be frogs?”

A murmur went up. The woman beside me, huge and amphibious-looking herself, shifted uneasily in her seat. My lower back announced itself with a distant buzz of pain and I felt the hackles rise on the back of my neck: this was what we’d come for.

“Cameroon,” B. Reid was saying, his voice rasping like dead leaves, “Ecuador, Borneo, the Andes and the Alps: everywhere you look the frogs and toads are disappearing, extinction like a plague, the planet a poorer and shabbier place. And what is it? What have we done? Acid rain? The ozone layer? Some poison we haven’t yet named? Ladies and gentlemen,” he rasped, “it’s the frogs today and tomorrow the biologists … before we know it the malls will stand empty, the freeways deserted, the creeks and ponds and marshes forever silent. We’re committing suicide!” he cried, and he gave his dreadlocks a Medusan swirl so that they beat like snakes round his head. “We’re doomed, can’t you see that?”

The audience sat riveted in their seats. No one breathed a word. I didn’t dare look at Adrian.

His voice dropped again. “Bufo canorus,” he said, and the name was like a prayer, a valediction, an obituary. “You all know my study in Yosemite. Six years I put into it, six years of crouching in the mud and breathing marsh gas and fighting leeches and ticks and all the rest of it, and what did it get me? What did it get the Yosemite toad? Extinction, that’s what. They’re gone. Wiped from the face of the earth.” He paused as if to gather his strength. “And what of Richard Wassersug’s albino leopard frogs in Nova Scotia? White tadpoles. Exclusively. What kind of mutation is that?” His voice clawed its way through the speakers, harsh with passion and the clangorous knelling of doom. “I’ll tell you what kind: a fatal one. A year later they were gone.”

My face was hot. Suddenly my back felt as if it were crawling with fire ants, seared by molten rain, drawn tight in a burning lariat. I looked at Adrian and her eyes were wild, panicky, a field of white in a thin net of veins. We’d come on a lark, and now here was the naked truth of our own mortality staring us in the face. I wanted to cry out for the frogs, the toads, the salamanders, for my own disconnected and rootless self.

But it wasn’t over yet. B. Reid contorted his features and threw back his head, and then he plunged a hand into the deep pocket of his coat; in the next instant his clenched fist shot into the air. I caught a glimpse of something dark and leathery, a strip of jerky, tissue with the life drained from it. “The Costa Rican golden toad,” he cried in his wild burnished declamatory tones, “R.I.P.!”

The woman beside me gasped. A cry went up from the back of the room. There was a shriek of chairs as people leapt to their feet.

B. Reid dug into his breast pocket and brandished another corpse. “Atelopus zeteki, the Peruvian variegated toad, R.I.P.!”

Cries of woe and lamentation.

“Rana marinus, R.I.P! The Gambian reed frog, R.I.P.!”

B. Reid held the lifeless things up before him as if he were exorcising demons. His voice sank to nothing. Slowly, painfully, he shook his head so that the coils of his hair drew a shroud over his face. “Don’t bother making the trip to Costa Rica, to Peru or Gambia,” he said finally, the shouts rising and dying round him. “These”—and his voice broke—“these are the last of them.”

The following day was my sister’s birthday, and I’d invited her, Jerry and the children to my place for dinner, though I didn’t feel much like going through with it after B. Reid’s presentation. The lecture hall had echoed like a chamber of doom with the dying rasp of his voice and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Stunned silent, our deepest fears made concrete in those grisly pennants of frog flesh, Adrian and I had left as soon as he stepped down from the podium, fighting our way through the press of stricken scientists and heartsick toad lovers and out into the rain. The world smelled of petroleum, acid, sulfur, the trees were bent and crippled, and the streets teemed with ugly and oblivious humanity. We took a cab directly to Grand Central. Neither of us had the stomach for lunch after what we’d been through, and we sat in silence all the way back, Adrian clutching Jane Austen to her breast and I turning The Frog Book over and over again in my hands. Each bump and rattle of the Hudson Line drove a burning stake into the small of my back.

The next morning I debated calling Charlene and telling her I was sick, but I felt guilty about it: why ruin my sister’s birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a handbasket? When Adrian showed up at ten with three bags of groceries and acting as if nothing had happened, I took two aspirin, cinched an apron round my waist and began pulverizing garbanzo beans.

All in all, it was a pleasant afternoon. The rain drove down outside and we built a fire in the dining room and left the door to the kitchen open while we cooked. Adrian found some chamber music on the radio and we shared a bottle of wine while she kneaded dough for the pita bread and I folded tahini into the garbanzo mash, sliced tomatoes and chopped onions. We chatted about little things — Frank Sinatra’s hair, whether puree was preferable to whole stewed tomatoes, our friends’ divorces, lint in the wash — steering clear of the fateful issue burning in both our minds. It was very nice. Tranquil. Domestic. The wine conspired with the aspirin, and after a while the knot in my back began to loosen.

Jerry, Charlene and the kids were early, and I served the hummus and pita bread while Adrian braised chunks of goat in a big black cast-iron pan she’d brought with her from her apartment. We were on our second drink and Jay and Nayeli, my nephew and niece, were out on the porch catching the icy rainwater as it drooled from the eaves, when Adrian threw herself down in the chair opposite Jerry and informed him in a clarion voice that the frogs were dying out.

The statement seemed to take him by surprise. He and Charlene had been giving me a seriocomic history of their yacht, which had thus far cost them something like $16,000 per hour at sea and which had been rammed, by Jerry, into a much bigger yacht on its maiden voyage out of the marina. Now they both paused to stare at Adrian. Jerry began to formulate his smile. “What did you say?”

Adrian smelled of goat and garlic. She was lanky and wide-eyed, with long beautifully articulated feet and limbs that belonged on a statue. She drew herself up at the edge of the chair and tried out a tentative smile. “Frogs,” she said. “And toads. Something is killing them off all over the world, from Alaska to Africa. We went to a conference yesterday. Peter and I.”

“Frogs?” Jerry repeated, stroking the bridge of his nose. His smile, in full efflorescence now, was something to behold. My sister, who favored my late mother around the eyes and nose, emitted a little chirp of amusement.

Adrian looked uncertain. She gave out with an abbreviated version of her horsey laugh and turned to me for encouragement.

“It’s not a joke,” I said. “We’re talking extinction here.”

“There was this man,” Adrian said, the words coming in a rush, “a biologist at the conference, B. Reid — from Berkeley — and he had all these dried frogs in his pockets … it was horrible….”

I could hear the rain on the roof, cold and unseasonal. Nayeli shouted something from the porch. The fire crackled in the hearth. I could see that we weren’t getting it right, that my brother-in-law, the doctor, was making a little notation of our mental state on the prescription pad of his mind. Why were we telling him all this? Was he, the perennial jokester who couldn’t even salvage my lower back, about to take on loss of habitat, eternal death and the transfiguration of life as we know it?

No, he wasn’t.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said after a moment. “You really believe in all this environmental hysteria.” He let the grin fade and gave us his stern off-at-the-knee look. “Peter, Adrian,” he said, drawing out the syllables in a profound and pedagogical way, “species conflict is the way of the world, has been from the beginning of time. Extinction is natural, expected: no species can hope to last forever. Even man. Conditions change.” He waved his hand and then laughed, making a joke of it. “If this weather doesn’t let up I think we’re in for a new ice age, and then where will your frogs be?”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“What about the dinosaurs, Peter?” Charlene interjected. “And the woolly mammoth?”

“Not to mention snake oil and bloodletting.” Jerry’s smile was back. He was in control. All was right with the world. “Things move on, things advance and change — why cry over something you can’t affect, a kind of fairy-tale Garden of Eden half these environmentalists never knew? Which is not to say I don’t agree with you—”

“My god!” Adrian cried, springing from her seat as if she’d been hot-wired. “The goat!”

Late that night, after everyone had gone home — even Adrian, though she’d gotten amorous at the door and would, I think, have spent the night but for my lack of enthusiasm — I eased into my armchair with the newspaper and tried to wipe my mind clean, a total abstersion, tabula rasa. I felt drained, desolate, a mass of meat, organ and bone slipping inexorably toward the grave along with my distant cousins the frogs and the toads. The rain continued. A chill fell over the room and I saw that the fire had burned down. There was a twinge in my back as I shifted my buttocks to adjust the heating pad, and then I began to read. I didn’t feel up to war in the Middle East, AIDS and the homeless or the obituaries, so I stuck to the movie reviews and personal-interest stories.

It was getting late, my mind had gone gratifyingly numb and I was just about to switch off the light and throw myself into bed, when I turned to the science section. A headline caught my eye:

HOPES RISE AS NEW SPECIES MOVE INTO SLUDGE OFF COAST

And what was this? I read on and discovered that these rising hopes were the result of the sudden appearance of tubeworms, solemya clams and bacteria in a formerly dead stretch of water in the Hudson Canyon, used from time immemorial as a repository for the city’s sewage and refuse. Down there, deep in the ancient layers of sludge, beneath the lapping fishless waves, there was life, burgeoning and thriving in a new medium. What hope. What terrific uplifting news. Tubeworms. They had to be joking.

After a while I folded up the newspaper, found my slippers and took this great and rising hope to bed with me.

The week that followed was as grim and unrelenting as the week that had given rise to it. Work was deadening (I shifted numbers on a screen for a living and the numbers had never seemed more meaningless), my back went through half a dozen daily cycles of searing agony and utter absence of feeling, and the weather never broke, not even for an hour. The skies were close and bruised, and the cold rain fell. I went directly home after work and didn’t answer the phone at night, though I knew it was Adrian calling. All week I thought of frogs and death.

And then, on Saturday, I woke to an outpouring of light and a sudden sharp apprehension of the world that was as palpable as a taste. I sat up. My feet found the floor. Naked and trembling, I crossed the room and stood at the window, the cord to the glowing blinds caught up in my hand, the stirrings of barometric change tugging at the long muscles of my lower back. Then I pulled the cord and the light spilled into the room, and in the next moment I was shoving the blinds aside and throwing open the window.

The air was pregnant, rich, thick with the scent of renewal and the perspicacious hum of the bees. All that moping, all those fears, the named dread and the nameless void: it all evaporated in the face of that hosanna of a morning. I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge roused on Christmas Day, Lazarus reanimated, Alexander the Great heading into Thrace. I opened every window in the house; I ate a muffin, read the paper, matched the glorious J. S. Bach to the triumph of the morning. It was heady, but I couldn’t sustain it. Ultimately, inevitably, like a sickness, the frogs and toads crept back into my head, and by 10:00 A.M. I was just another mortal with a bad back sinking into oblivion.

It was then, at the bottom of that trough, that I had an inspiration. The coffee was cold in the cup, the newsprint rumpled, Bach silenced by the tyranny of a mechanical arm, and suddenly a notion hit me and I was up and out of the kitchen chair as if I’d been launched. The force of it carried me to the bedroom closet, where I dug around for my hiking boots, a sweatshirt, my Yankees cap and a denim jacket, and then to the medicine cabinet, where I unearthed the tick repellant and an old aerosol can of Off! Then I dialed Adrian.

“Adrian,” I gasped, “my heart, my love—”

Her voice was thick with sleep. “Is this an obscene phone call?”

“I’ve been gloomy lately, I know it—”

“Not to mention not answering the phone.”

“I admit it, I admit it. But have you seen the day out there?”

She hadn’t. She was still in bed.

“What I’m thinking is this: how can we take B. Reid’s word for it? How can we take anybody’s?”

I didn’t know where to begin looking for the elusive toad, Bufo americanus, let alone the spring peeper or the leopard frog, but I was seized with a desire to know them, touch them, observe their gouty limbs and clumsy rituals, partake once more of the seething life of pond, puddle and ditch, and at least temporarily lay to rest the nagging memory of B. Reid and his diminutive corpses. It was irrational, I knew it, but I felt that if I could see them, just this once, and know they were occupying their humble niche in the hierarchy of being, everything would be all right.

We parked along the highway and poked desultorily through the ditch alongside it, but there was nothing animate in sight. The old cane was sharp and brittle, and there was Styrofoam, glass and aluminum everywhere. Trucks stole the air from our lungs, teenagers jeered. Adrian suggested a promising-looking puddle on the far verge of the rutted commuter lot at the Garrison station, but we found nothing there except submerged gum wrappers and potato-chip bags ground into the muck by the numbing impress of steel-belted radials. “We can’t give up,” she said, and there was just the faintest catch of desperation in her voice. “What about the woods off the Appalachian Trail? You know, where it crosses the road down by K mart?”

“All right,” I said, and the fever was on me, “we’ll give it a try.”

Twenty minutes later we were in the woods, sun glazing bole and branch, tender new yellow-green leaves unfolding overhead, birds shooting up from the path as if jerked on a string. There was a smell here I’d forgotten, the dark wet odor of process, of things breaking down and springing up again, of spore and pollen and seed and mulch. Bugs hovered round my face. I was sweating. And yet I felt good, strong in back and leg, already liberated from the cloud that had hung over me all week, and as I followed Adrian up the long slow incline of the path, I thought I’d never seen such a miracle as the way the muscles of her thighs and buttocks flexed and relaxed in the grip of her jeans. This was nature.

We’d gone a mile or so when she suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the path. “What’s the matter?” I said, but she waved her hand to shush me. I edged forward till I stood beside her, my pulse quickening, breath caught high in my throat. “What?” I whispered. “What is it?”

“Listen.”

At first I couldn’t hear it, my ears attuned to civilization, the chatter of the TV, high fidelity, the blast of the internal-combustion engine, but then the woods began to speak to me. The sound was indistinct at first, but after a while it began to separate into its individual voices, the smallest rustlings and crepitations, the high-pitched disputations of the birds, the trickle of running water — and something else, something at once strange and familiar, a chirping fluid trill that rose strong and multivoiced in the near distance. Adrian turned to me and smiled.

All at once we were in a hurry, breathless, charging through the frost-burned undergrowth and sharp stinging branches, off the path and down the throat of a dark and sodden ravine. I thought nothing. B. Reid, Jerry, herniated discs, compound fractures, the soft green glow of the computer monitor: nothing. We moved together, with a fluid balletic grace, the most natural thing in the world, hunched over, darting right, then left, ducking this obstruction, vaulting the next, shoving through the tangle as easily as we might have parted the bead curtains in a Chinese restaurant. And as we drew closer, that sound, that trill, that raucous joyous paean to life swelled round us till it seemed to vibrate in our every cell and fiber. “There!” Adrian cried suddenly. “Over there!”

I saw it in that moment, a shallow little scoop of a pond caught in the web of the branches. The water gave nothing back, dead black under the buttery sun, and it was choked with the refuse of the trees. I saw movement there, and the ululating chorus rang out to the treetops, every new leaf shuddering on every branch. The smell came at me then, the working odor, rank and sweet and ripe. I took Adrian’s hand and we moved toward the water in a kind of trance.

We were up to our ankles, our boots soaked through, when the pond fell silent — it happened in a single stroke, on the beat, as if a conductor had dropped his baton. And then we saw that there was no surface to that pond, that it was a field of flesh, a grand and vast congress of toads. They materialized before our eyes, stumpy limbs and foreshortened bodies clambering over one another, bobbing like apples in a barrel. There they were — toads, toads uncountable — humping in a frenzy of webbed feet and seething snouts, humping blindly, stacked up three and four high. Their eggs were everywhere, beaded and wet with the mucus of life, and all their thousands of eyes glittered with lust. We could hear them clawing at one another, grunting, and we didn’t know what to do. And then a single toad at the edge of the pond started in with his thin piping trill and in an instant we were forgotten and the whole pullulating mass of them took it up and it was excruciating, beautiful, wild to the core.

Adrian looked at me and I couldn’t help myself: I moved into her arms. I was beyond, reason or thought, and what did it matter? She pushed away from me then, for just a moment, and stepped back, water swirling, toads thrilling, to strip off her shirt and the black lace brassiere beneath it. Holding me with her eyes, she moved back another step and dropped them there, in the wet at the edge of the pond, and eased herself down as if into a nest. I’d never seen anything like it. I shrugged out of my denim jacket, tore off my shirt, sailed the Yankees cap into oblivion. And when I came for her, the toads leapt for their lives.

(1990)

DESCENT OF MAN

I was living with a woman who suddenly began to stink. It was very difficult. The first time I confronted her she merely smiled. “Occupational hazard,” she said. The next time she curled her lip. There were other problems too. Hairs, for instance. Hairs that began to appear on her clothing, sharp and black and brutal. Invariably I would awake to find these hairs in my mouth, or I would glance into the mirror to see them slashing like razor edges across the collars of my white shirts. Then too there was the fruit. I began to discover moldering bits of it about the house — apple and banana most characteristically — but plum and tangelo or even passion fruit and yim-yim were not at all anomalous. These fruit fragments occurred principally in the bedroom, on the pillow, surrounded by darkening spots. It was not long before I located their source: they lay hidden like gems in the long wild hanks of her hair. Another occupational hazard.

Jane was in the habit of sitting before the air conditioner when she came home from work, fingering out her hair, drying the sweat from her face and neck in the cool hum of the machine, fruit bits sifting silently to the carpet, black hairs drifting like feathers. On these occasions the room would fill with the stink of her, bestial and fetid. And I would find my eyes watering, my mind imaging the dark rotting trunks of the rain forest, stained sienna and mandalay and Hooker’s green with the excrements dropped from above. My ears would keen with the whistling and crawking of the jungle birds, the screechings of the snot-nosed apes in the branches. And then, slack-faced and tight-boweled, I would step into the bathroom and retch, the sweetness of my own intestinal secrets a balm against the potent hairy stench of her.

One evening, just after her bath (the faintest odor lingered, yet still it was so trenchant I had to fight the impulse to get up and urinate on a tree or a post or something), I laid my hand casually across her belly and was suddenly startled to see an insect flit from its cover, skate up the swell of her abdomen, and bury itself in her navel. “Good Christ,” I said.

“Hm?” she returned, peering over the cover of her Yerkish reader.

“That,” I said. “That bug, that insect, that vermin.”

She sat up, plucked the thing from its cachette, raised it to her lips and popped it between her front teeth. “Louse,” she said, sucking. “Went down to the old age home on Thirteenth Street to pick them up.”

I anticipated her. “Not for—?”

“Why certainly, potpie — so Konrad can experience a tangible gratification of his social impulses during the grooming ritual. You know: you scratch my back, I scratch yours.”

I lay in bed that night sweating, thinking about Jane and those slippery-fingered monkeys poking away at her, and listening for the lice crawling across her scalp or nestling their bloody little siphons in the tufts under her arms. Finally, about four, I got up and took three Doriden. I woke at two in the afternoon, an insect in my ear. It was only an earwig. I had missed my train, failed to call in at the office. There was a note from Jane: Pick me up at four. Konrad sends love.

The Primate Center stood in the midst of a macadamized acre or two, looking very much like a school building: faded brick, fluted columns, high mesh fences. Finger paintings and mobiles hung in the windows, misshapen ceramics crouched along the sills. A flag raggled at the top of a whitewashed flagpole. I found myself bending to examine the cornerstone: Asa Priff Grammar School, 1939. Inside it was dark and cool, the halls were lined with lockers and curling watercolors, the linoleum gleamed like a shy smile. I stepped into the BOYS’ ROOM. The urinals were a foot and a half from the floor. Designed for little people, I mused. Youngsters. Hardly big enough to hold their little peters without the teacher’s help. I smiled, and situated myself over one of the toy urinals, the strong honest scent of Pine-Sol in my nostrils. At that moment the door wheezed open and a chimpanzee shuffled in. He was dressed in shorts, shirt and bow tie. He nodded to me, it seemed, and made a few odd gestures with his hands as he moved up to the urinal beside mine. Then he opened his fly and pulled out an enormous slick red organ like a peeled banana. I looked away, embarrassed, but could hear him urinating mightily. The stream hissed against the porcelain like a thunderstorm, rattled the drain as it went down. My own water wouldn’t come. I began to feel foolish. The chimp shook himself daintily, zippered up, pulled the plunger, crossed to the sink, washed and dried his hands, and left. I found I no longer had to go.

Out in the hallway the janitor was leaning on his flathead broom. The chimp stood before him gesticulating with manic dexterity: brushing his forehead and tugging his chin, slapping his hands under his armpits, tapping his wrists, his tongue, his ear, his lip. The janitor watched intently. Suddenly — after a particularly virulent flurry — the man burst into laughter, rich braying globes of it. The chimp folded his lip and joined in, adding his weird nasal snickering to the janitor’s barrel-laugh. I stood by the door to the BOYS’ ROOM in a quandary. I began to feel that it might be wiser to wait in the car — but then I didn’t want to call attention to myself, darting in and out like that. The janitor might think I was stealing paper towels or something. So I stood there, thinking to have a word with him after the chimp moved on — with the expectation that he could give me some grassroots insight into the nature of Jane’s job. But the chimp didn’t move on. The two continued laughing, now harder than ever. The janitor’s face was tear-streaked. Each time he looked up the chimp produced a gesticular flurry that would stagger him again. Finally the janitor wound down a bit, and still chuckling, held out his hands, palms up. The chimp flung his arms up over his head and then heaved them down again, rhythmically slapping the big palms with his own. “Right on! Mastuh Konrad,” the janitor said. “Right on!” The chimp grinned, then hitched up his shorts and sauntered off down the hall. The janitor turned back to his broom, still chuckling.

I cleared my throat. The broom” began a geometrically precise course up the hall toward me. It stopped at my toes, the ridge of detritus flush with the pinions of my wingtips. The janitor looked up. The pupil of his right eye was fixed in the corner, beneath the lid, and the white was red. There was an ironic gap between his front teeth. “Kin ah do sumfin fo yo, mah good man?” he said.

“I’m waiting for Miss Good.”

“Ohhh, Miz Good,” he said, nodding his head. “Fust ah tought yo was thievin paypuh tow-els outen de Boys’ Room but den when ah sees yo standin dere rigid as de Venus de Milo ah thinks to mahsef: he is some kinda new sculpture de stoodents done made is what he is.” He was squinting up at me and grinning like we’d just come back from sailing around the world together.

“That’s a nice broom,” I said.

He looked at me steadily, grinning still. “Yo’s wonderin what me and Mastuh Konrad was jivin bout up dere, isn’t yo? Well, ah tells yo: he was relatin a hoomerous anecdote, de punch line ob which has deep cosmic implications in dat it establishes a common groun between monks and Ho-mo sapiens despite dere divergent ancestries.” He shook his head, chortled. “Yes, in-deed, dat Mastuh Konrad is quite de wit.”

“You mean to tell me you actually understand all that lip-pulling and finger-waving?” I was beginning to feel a nameless sense of outrage.

“Oh sartinly, mah good man. Dat ASL.”

“What?”

“ASL is what we was talkin. A-merican Sign Language. Developed for de deef n dumb. Yo sees, Mastuh Konrad is sumfin ob a genius round here. He can commoonicate de mos esoteric i-deas in bof ASL and Yerkish, re-spond to and translate English, French, German and Chinese. Fack, it was Miz Good was tellin me dat Konrad is workin right now on a Yerkish translation ob Darwin’s De-scent o Man. He is mainly into anthro-pology, yo knows, but he has cultivated a in-teress in udder fields too. Dis lass fall he done undertook a Yerkish translation ob Chomsky’s Language and Mind and Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse. And dat’s some pretty heavy shit, Jackson.”

I was hot with outrage, “Stuff,” I said. “Stuff and nonsense.”

“No sense in feelin personally treatened by Mastuh Konrad’s chievements, mah good fellow — yo’s got to ree-lize dat he is a genius.”

A word came to me: “Bullhonk,” I said. And turned to leave.

The janitor caught me by the shirtsleeve. “He is now scorin his turd opera,” he whispered. I tore away from him and stamped out of the building.

Jane was waiting in the car. I climbed in, cranked down the sunroof and opened the air vents.

At home I poured a water glass of gin, held it to my nostrils and inhaled. Jane sat before the air conditioner, her hair like a urinal mop, stinking. Black hairs cut the atmosphere, fruit bits whispered to the carpet. Occasionally the tip of my tongue entered the gin. I sniffed and tasted, thinking of plastic factories and turpentine distilleries and rich sulfurous smoke. On my way to the bedroom I poured a second glass.

In the bedroom I sniffed gin and dressed for dinner. “Jane?” I called, “shouldn’t you be getting ready?” She appeared in the doorway. She was dressed in her work clothes: jeans and sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was gray and hooded. There were yellow stains on the sleeves. I thought of the lower depths of animal cages, beneath the floor meshing. “I figured I’d go like this,” she said. I was knotting my tie. “And I wish you’d stop insisting on baths every night — I’m getting tired of smelling like a coupon in a detergent box. It’s unnatural. Unhealthy.”

In the car on the way to the restaurant I lit a cigar, a cheap twisted black thing like half a pepperoni. Jane sat hunched against the door, unwashed. I had never before smoked a cigar. I tried to start a conversation but Jane said she didn’t feel like talking: talk seemed so useless, such an anachronism. We drove on in silence. And I reflected that this was not the Jane I knew and loved. Where, I wondered, was the girl who changed wigs three or four times a day and sported nails like a Chinese emperor’s? — and where was the girl who dressed like an Arabian bazaar and smelled like the trade winds?

She was committed. The project, the study, grants. I could read the signs: she was growing away from me.

The restaurant was dark, a maze of rocky gardens, pancake-leafed vegetation, black fountains. We stood squinting just inside the door. Birds whistled, carp hissed through the pools. Somewhere a monkey screeched. Jane put her hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. “Siamang,” she said. At that moment the leaves parted beside us: a rubbery little fellow emerged and motioned us to sit on a bench beneath a wicker birdcage. He was wearing a soiled loincloth and eight or ten necklaces of yellowed teeth. His hair flamed out like a brushfire. In the dim light from the braziers I noticed his nostrils — both shrunken and pinched, as if once pierced straight through. His face was of course inscrutable. As soon as we were seated he removed my socks and shoes, Jane’s sneakers, and wrapped our feet in what I later learned were plantain leaves. I started to object — I bitterly resent anyone looking at my feet — but Jane shushed me. We had waited three months for reservations.

The maître d’ signed for us to follow, and led us through a dripping stonewalled tunnel to an outdoor garden where the flagstones gave way to dirt and we found ourselves on a narrow plant-choked path. He licked along like an iguana and we hurried to keep up. Wet fronds slapped back in my face, creepers snatched at my ankles, mud sucked at the plantain leaves on my feet. The scents of mold and damp and long-lying urine hung in the air, and I thought of the men’s room at the subway station. It was dark as a womb. I offered Jane my hand, but she refused it. Her breathing was fast. The monkey chatter was loud as a zoo afire. “Far out,” she said. I slapped a mosquito on my neck.

A moment later we found ourselves seated at a bamboo table overhung with branch and vine. Across from us sat Dr. and Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo, director of the Primate Center and wife. A candle guttered between them. I cleared my throat, and then began idly tracing my finger around the circular hole cut in the table’s center. The Doctor’s ears were the size of peanuts. “Glad you two could make it,” he said. “I’ve long been urging Jane to sample some of our humble island fare.” I smiled, crushed a spider against the back of my chair. The Doctor’s English was perfect, pure Martha’s Vineyard — he sounded like Ted Kennedy’s insurance salesman. His wife’s was weak: “Yes,” she said, “missing cook here, all roar.” “How exciting!” said Jane. And then the conversation turned to primates, and the Center.

Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo and I smiled at one another. Jane and the Doctor were already deeply absorbed in a dialogue concerning the incidence of anal retention in chimps deprived of Frisbee coordination during the sensorimotor period. I gestured toward them with my head and arched my eyebrows wittily. Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo giggled. It was then that Jane’s proximity began to affect me. The close wet air seemed to concentrate her essence, distill its potency. The U-Hwak-Los seemed unaffected. I began to feel queasy. I reached for the fingerbowl and drank down its contents. Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo smiled. It was coconut oil. Just then the waiter appeared carrying a wooden bowl the size of a truck tire. A single string of teeth slapped against his breastbone as he set the bowl down and slipped off into the shadows. The Doctor and Jane were oblivious — they were talking excitedly, occasionally lapsing into what I took to be ASL, ear- and nose-and lip-picking like a manager and his third-base coach. I peered into the bowl: it was filled to the rim with clean-picked chicken bones. Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo nodded, grinning: “No ontray,” she said. “Appeticer.” At that moment a simian screamed somewhere close, screamed like death itself. Jane looked up. “Rhesus,” she said.

On my return from the men’s room I had some difficulty locating the table in the dark. I had already waded through two murky fountains and was preparing to plunge through my third when I heard Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo’s voice behind me. “Here,” she said. “Make quick, repass now serve.” She took my hand and led me back to the table. “Oh, they’re enormously resourceful,” the Doctor was saying as I stumbled into my chair, pants wet to the knees. “They first employ a general anesthetic — distillation of the chu-bok root — and then the chef (who logically doubles as village surgeon) makes a circular incision about the macaque’s cranium, carefully peeling back the already-shaven scalp, and stanching the blood flow quite effectively with maura-ro, a highly absorbent powder derived from the tamana leaf. He then removes both the frontal and parietal plates to expose the brain …” I looked at Jane: she was rapt. I wasn’t really listening. My attention was directed toward what I took to be the main course, which had appeared in my absence. An unsteady pinkish mound now occupied the center of the table, completely obscuring the circular hole — it looked like cherry vanilla yogurt, a carton and a half, perhaps two. On closer inspection I noticed several black hairs peeping out from around its flaccid edges. And thought immediately of the bush-headed maître d’. I pointed to one of the hairs, remarking to Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo that the rudiments of culinary hygiene could be a little more rigorously observed among the staff. She smiled. Encouraged, I asked her what exactly the dish was. “Much delicacy,” she said. “Very rare find in land of Lincoln.” At that moment the waiter appeared and handed each of us a bamboo stick beaten flat and sharpened at one end.

“… then the tribal elders or visiting dignitaries are seated around the table,” the Doctor was saying. “The chef has previously of course located the macaque beneath the table, the exposed part of the creature’s brain protruding from the hole in its center. After the feast, the lower ranks of the village population divide up the remnants. It’s really quite efficient.”

“How fascinating!” said Jane. “Shall we try some?”

“By all means … but tell me, how has Konrad been coming with that Yerkish epic he’s been working up?”

Jane turned to answer, bamboo stick poised: “Oh I’m so glad you asked — I’d almost forgotten. He’s finished his tenth book and tells me he’ll be doing two more — out of deference to the Miltonic tradition. Isn’t that a groove?”

“Yes,” said the Doctor, gesturing toward the rosy lump in the center of the table. “Yes it is. He’s certainly — and I hope you won’t mind the pun — a brainy fellow. Ho-ho.”

“Oh Doctor,” Jane laughed, and plunged her stick into the pink. Beneath the table, in the dark, a tiny fist clutched at my pantleg.

I missed work again the following day. This time it took five Doriden to put me under. I had lain in bed sweating and tossing, listening to Jane’s quiet breathing, inhaling her fumes. At dawn I dozed off, dreamed briefly of elementary school cafeterias swarming with knickered chimps and weltered with trays of cherry vanilla yogurt, and woke stale-mouthed. Then I took the pills. It was three-thirty when I woke again. There was a note from Jane: Bringing Konrad home for dinner. Vacuum rug and clean toilet.

Konrad was impeccably dressed — long pants, platform wedgies, cufflinks. He smelled of eau de cologne, Jane of used litter. They arrived during the seven o’clock news. I opened the door for them. “Hello, Jane,” I said. We stood at the door, awkward, silent. “Well?” she said. “Aren’t you going to greet our guest?” “Hello, Konrad,” I said. And then: “I believe we met in the boys’ room at the Center the other day?” He bowed deeply, straight-faced, his upper lip like a halved cantaloupe. Then he broke into a snicker, turned to Jane and juggled out an impossible series of gestures. Jane laughed. Something caught in my throat. “Is he trying to say something?” I asked. “Oh potpie,” she said, “it was nothing — just a little quote from Yeats.”

“Yeats?”

“Yes, you know: ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing.’”

Jane served watercress sandwiches and animal crackers as hors d’oeuvres. She brought them into the living room on a cut-glass serving tray and set them down before Konrad and me, where we sat on the sofa, watching the news. Then she returned to the kitchen. Konrad plucked up a tiny sandwich and swallowed it like a communion wafer, sucking the tips of his fingers. Then he lifted the tray and offered it to me. I declined. “No thank you,” I said. Konrad shrugged, set the plate down in his lap and carefully stacked all the sandwiches in its center. I pretended to be absorbed with the news: actually I studied him, half-face. He was filling the gaps in his sandwich-construction with animal crackers. His lower lip protruded, his ears were rubbery, he was balding. With both hands he crushed the heap of crackers and sandwiches together and began kneading it until it took on the consistency of raw dough. Then he lifted the whole thing to his mouth and swallowed it without chewing. There were no whites to his eyes.

Konrad’s only reaction to the newscast was a burst of excitement over a war story — the reporter stood against a wasteland of treadless tanks and recoilless guns in Thailand or Syria or Chile; huts were burning, old women weeping. “Wow-wow! Eeeeeeee! Er-er-er-er,” Konrad said. Jane appeared in the kitchen doorway, hands dripping. “What is it, Konrad?” she said. He made a series of violent gestures. “Well?” I asked. She translated: “Konrad says that ‘the pig oppressors’ genocidal tactics will lead to their mutual extermination and usher in a new golden age …’”—here she hesitated, looked up at him to continue (he was springing up and down on the couch, flailing his fists as though they held whips and scourges)—“’… of freedom and equality for all, regardless of race, creed, color — or genus.’ I wouldn’t worry,” she added, “it’s just his daily slice of revolutionary rhetoric. He’ll calm down in a minute — he likes to play Che, but he’s basically nonviolent.”

Ten minutes later Jane served dinner. Konrad, with remarkable speed and coordination, consumed four cans of fruit cocktail, thirty-two spareribs, half a dozen each of oranges, apples and pomegranates, two cheeseburgers and three quarts of chocolate malted. In the kitchen, clearing up, I commented to Jane about our guest’s prodigious appetite. He was sitting in the other room, listening to Don Giovanni, sipping brandy. Jane said that he was a big, active male and that she could attest to his need for so many calories. “How much does he weigh?” I asked. “Stripped,” she said, “one eighty-one. When he stands up straight he’s four-eight and three quarters.” I mulled over this information while I scraped away at the dishes, filed them in the dishwasher, neat ranks of blue china. A few moments later I stepped into the living room to observe Jane stroking Konrad’s ears, his head in her lap. I stand five-seven, one forty-three.

When I returned from work the following day, Jane was gone. Her dresser drawers were bare, the closet empty. There were white rectangles on the wall where her Rousseau reproductions had hung. The top plank of the bookcase was ribbed with the dust-prints of her Edgar Rice Burroughs collection. Her girls’ softball trophy, her natural foods cookbook, her oaken cudgel, her moog, her wok: all gone. There were no notes. A pain jabbed at my sternum, tears started in my eyes. I was alone, deserted, friendless. I began to long even for the stink of her. On the pillow in the bedroom I found a fermenting chunk of pineapple. And sobbed.

By the time I thought of the Primate Center the sun was already on the wane. It was dark when I got there. Loose gravel grated beneath my shoes in the parking lot; the flag snapped at the top of its pole; the lights grinned lickerishly from the Center’s windows. Inside the lighting was subdued, the building hushed. I began searching through the rooms, opening and slamming doors. The linoleum glowed all the way up the long corridor. At the far end I heard someone whistling “My Old Kentucky Home.” It was the janitor. “Howdedo,” he said. “Wut kin ah do fo yo at such a inauspicious hour ob de night?”

I was candid with him. “I’m looking for Miss Good.”

“Ohhh, she leave bout fo-turdy evy day — sartinly yo should be well apprised ob dat fack.”

“I thought she might be working late tonight.”

“Noooo, no chance ob dat.” He was staring at the floor.

“Mind if I look for myself?”

“Mah good man, ah trusts yo is not intimatin dat ah would dis-kise de troof … far be it fum me to pre-varicate jus to proteck a young lady wut run off fum a man dat doan unnerstan her needs nor ‘low her to spress de natchrul inclination ob her soul.”

At that moment a girlish giggle sounded from down the hall. Jane’s girlish giggle. The janitor’s right hand spread itself across my chest. “Ah wooden in-sinooate mahsef in de middle ob a highly sinificant speriment if ah was yo, Jackson,” he said, hissing through the gap in his teeth. I pushed by him and started down the corridor. Jane’s laugh leaped out again. From the last door on my left. I hurried. Suddenly the Doctor and his wife stepped from the shadows to block the doorway. “Mr. Horne,” said the Doctor, arms folded against his chest, “take hold of yourself. We are conducting a series of experiments here that I simply cannot allow you to—”

“A fig for your experiments,” I shouted. “I want to speak to my, my — roommate.” I could hear the janitor’s footsteps behind me. “Get out of my way, Doctor,” I said. Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo smiled. I felt panicky. “Is dey a problem here, Doc?” the janitor said, his breath hot on the back of my neck. I broke. Grabbed the Doctor by his elbows, wheeled around and shoved him into the janitor. They went down on the linoleum like spastic skaters. I applied my shoulder to the door and battered my way in, Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo’s shrill in my ear: “You make big missake, Misser!” Inside I found Jane, legs and arms bare, pinching a lab smock across her chest. She looked puzzled at first, then annoyed. She stepped up to me, made some rude gestures in my face. I could hear scrambling in the hallway behind me. Then I saw Konrad — in a pair of baggy BVDs. I grabbed Jane. But Konrad was there in an instant — he hit me like the grille of a Cadillac and I spun across the room, tumbling desks and chairs as I went. I slumped against the chalkboard. The door slammed: Jane was gone. Konrad swelled his chest, swayed toward me, the fluorescent lights hissing overhead, the chalkboard cold against the back of my neck. And I looked up into the black eyes, teeth, fur, rock-ribbed arms.

(1974)

CAVIAR

I ought to tell you right off I didn’t go to college. I was on the wrong run of the socioeconomic ladder, if you know what I mean. My father was a commercial fisherman on the Hudson, till the PCBs got to him, my mother did typing and filing down at the lumberyard, and my grandmother crocheted doilies and comforters for sale to rich people. Me, I took over my father’s trade. I inherited the shack at thé end of the pier, the leaky fourteen-foot runabout with the thirty-five-horse Evinrude motor and the seine that’s been in the family for three generations. Also, I got to move into the old man’s house when he passed on, and he left me his stamp collection and the keys to his ‘62 Rambler, rusted through till it looked like a gill net hung out to dry.

Anyway, it’s a living. Almost. And if I didn’t go to college I do read a lot, magazines mostly, but books on ecology and science too. Maybe it was the science part that did me in. You see, I’m the first one around here — I mean, me and Marie are the first ones — to have a baby this new way, where you can’t have it on your own. Dr. Ziss said not to worry about it, a little experiment, think of it as a gift from heaven.

Some gift.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. What happens happens, and I’m as guilty as anybody, I admit it. It’s just that when the guys at the Flounder Inn are sniggering in their beer and Marie starts looking at me like I’m a toad or something, you’ve got to put things in perspective, you’ve got to realize that it was her all along, she’s the one that started it.

“I want a baby,” was how she put it.

It was April, raw and wet. Crocuses and dead man’s fingers were poking through the dirt along the walk, and the stripers were running. I’d just stepped in the door, beat, chilled to the teeth, when she made her announcement. I went straight for the coffeepot. “Can’t afford it,” I said.

She didn’t plead or try to reason with me. All she did was repeat herself in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she were telling me about some new drapes or a yard sale, and then she marched through the kitchen and out the back door. I sipped at my coffee and watched her through the window. She had a shovel. She was burying something. Deep. When she came back in, her nose was running a bit and her eyes were crosshatched with tiny red lines.

“What were you doing out there?” I asked.

Her chin was crumpled, her hair was wild. “Burying something.”

I waited while she fussed with the teapot, my eyebrows arched like question marks. Ten seconds ticked by. “Well, what?”

“My diaphragm.”

I’ve known Marie since high school. We were engaged for five years while she worked for Reader’s Digest and we’d been married for three and a half when she decided she wanted some offspring. At first I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but then I had to admit she was right: the time had come. Our lovemaking had always been lusty and joyful, but after she buried the diaphragm it became tender, intense, purposeful. We tried. For months we tried. I’d come in off the river, reeking of the creamy milt and silver roe that floated two inches deep in the bottom of the boat while fifty- and sixty-pound stripers gasped their last, come in like a wild bull or something, and Marie would be waiting for me upstairs in her nightie and we’d do it before dinner, and then again after. Nothing happened.

Somewhere around July or August, the sweet blueclaw crabs crawling up the riverbed like an army on maneuvers and the humid heat lying over the valley like a cupped hand, Marie went to Sister Eleazar of the Coptic Brotherhood of Ethiop. Sister Eleazar was a black woman, six feet tall at least, in a professor’s gown and a fez with a red tassel. Leroy Lent’s wife swore by her. Six years Leroy and his wife had been going at it, and then they went to Sister Eleazar and had a pair of twins. Marie thought it was worth a try, so I drove her down there.

The Coptic Brotherhood of Ethiop occupied a lime-green building the size of a two-car garage with a steeple and cross pinned to the roof. Sister Eleazar answered our knock scowling, a little crescent of egg yolk on her chin. “What you want?” she said.

Standing there in the street, a runny-eyed Chihuahua sniffing at my heels, I listened to Marie explain our problem and watched the crescent of egg on Sister Eleazar’s face fracture with her smile. “Ohhh,” she said, “well, why didn’t you say so? Come own in, come own in.”

There was one big room inside, poorly lit. Old bottom-burnished pews stretched along three of the four walls and there was a big shiny green table in the center of the floor. The table was heaped with religious paraphernalia — silver salvers and chalices and tinted miniatures of a black man with a crown dwarfing his head. A cot and an icebox huddled against the back wall, which was decorated with magazine clippings of Africa. “Right here, sugar,” Sister Eleazar said, leading Marie up to the table. “Now, you take off your coat and your dress, and less ex-amine them wombs.”

Marie handed me her coat, and then her tight blue dress with the little white clocks on it, while Sister Eleazar cleared the chalices and whatnot off the table. The Chihuahua had followed us in, and now it sprang up onto the cot with a sigh and buried its nose in its paws. The room stank of dog.

“All right,” Sister Eleazar said, turning back to Marie, “you climb up own the table now and stretch yourself out so Sister ‘Leazar can listen to your insides and say a prayer over them barren wombs.” Marie complied with a nervous smile, and the black woman leaned forward to press an ear to her abdomen. I watched the tassel of Sister Eleazar’s fez splay out over Marie’s rib cage and I began to get excited: the place dark and exotic, Marie in brassiere and panties, laid out on the table like a sacrificial virgin. Then the sister was mumbling something — a prayer, I guess — in a language I’d never heard before. Marie looked embarrassed. “Don’t you worry about nothin’,” Sister Eleazar said, looking up at me and winking. “I got just the thing.”

She fumbled around underneath the cot for a minute, then came back to the table with a piece of blue chalk — the same as they use in geography class to draw rivers and lakes on the blackboard — and a big yellow can of Colman’s dry mustard. She bent over Marie like a heart surgeon, and then, after a few seconds of deliberation, made a blue X on Marie’s lower abdomen and said, “Okay, honey, you can get up now.”

I watched Marie shrug into her dress, thinking the whole thing was just a lot of superstitious mumbo jumbo and pisantry, when I felt Sister Eleazar’s fingers on my arm; she dipped her head and led me out the front door. The sky was overcast. I could smell rain in the air. “Listen,” the black woman whispered, handing me the can of mustard, “the problem ain’t with her, it’s with you. Must be you ain’t penetratin’ deep enough.” I looked into her eyes, trying to keep my face expressionless. Her voice dropped. “What you do is this: make a plaster of this here mustard and rub it on your parts before you go into her, and it’ll force out that ‘jaculation like a torpedo coming out a submarine — know what I mean?” Then she winked. Marie was at the door. A man with a hoe was digging at his garden in the next yard over. “Oh yeah,” the sister said, holding out her hand, “you want to make a donation to the Brotherhood, that’ll be eleven dollars and fifty cent.”

I never told Marie about the mustard — it was too crazy. All I said was that the sister had told me to give her a mustard plaster on the stomach an hour after we had intercourse — to help the seeds take. It didn’t work, of course. Nothing worked. But the years at Reader’s Digest had made Marie a superstitious woman, and I was willing to go along with just about anything as long as it made her feel better. One night I came to bed and she was perched naked on the edge of the footstool, wound round three times with a string of garlic. “I thought that was for vampires?” I said. She just parted her lips and held out her arms.

In the next few weeks she must have tried every quack remedy in the book. She kept a toad in a clay pot under the bed, ate soup composed of fish eyes and roe, drank goat’s milk and cod-liver oil, and filled the medicine chest with elixirs made from nimble weed and rhinoceros horn. Once I caught her down in the basement, dancing in the nude round a live rooster. I was eating meal three meals a day to keep my strength up. Then one night I came across an article about test-tube babies in Science Digest. I studied the pictures for a long while, especially the one at the end of the article that showed this English couple, him with a bald dome and her fat as a sow, with their little test-tube son. Then I called Marie.

Dr. Ziss took us right away. He sympathized with our plight, he said, and would do all he could to help us. First he would have to run some tests to see just what the problem was and whether it could be corrected surgically. He led us into the examining room and looked into our eyes and ears, tapped our knees, measured our blood pressure. He drew blood, squinted at my sperm under a microscope, took X rays, did a complete pelvic exam on Marie. His nurse was Irene Goddard, lived up the street from us. She was a sour, square-headed woman in her fifties with little vertical lines etched around her lips. She prodded and poked and pricked us and then had us fill out twenty or thirty pages of forms that asked about everything from bowel movements to whether my grandmother had any facial hair. Two weeks later I got a phone call. The doctor wanted to see us.

We’d hardly got our jackets off when Mrs. Goddard, with a look on her face like she was about to pull the switch at Sing Sing, showed us into the doctor’s office. I should tell you that Dr. Ziss is a young man — about my age, I guess — with narrow shoulders, a little clipped mustache, and a woman’s head of hair that he keeps brushing back with his hand. Anyway, he was sitting behind his desk sifting through a pile of charts and lab reports when we walked in. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” Marie went pale, like she did the time the state troopers called about her mother’s accident; her ankles swayed over her high heels and she fell back into the chair as if she’d been shoved. I thought she was going to cry, but the doctor forestalled her. He smiled, showing off all those flossed and fluoridated teeth: “I’ve got some good news too.”

The bad news was that Marie’s ovaries were shot. She was suffering from the Stein-Leventhal syndrome, he said, and was unable to produce viable ova. He put it to us straight: “She’s infertile, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Even if we had the facilities and the know-how, test-tube reproduction would be out of the question.”

Marie was stunned. I stared down at the linoleum for a second and listened to her sniffling, then took her hand.

Dr. Ziss leaned across the desk and pushed back a stray lock of hair. “But there is an alternative.”

We both looked at him.

“Have you considered a surrogate mother? A young woman who’d be willing to impregnate herself artificially with the husband’s semen — for a fee, of course — and then deliver the baby to the wife at the end of the term.” He was smoothing his mustache. “It’s being done all over the country. And if Mrs. Trimpie pads herself during her ‘pregnancy’ and ‘delivers’ in the city, none of your neighbors need ever know that the child isn’t wholly and naturally yours.”

My mind was racing. I was bombarded with selfish, and acquisitive thoughts, seething with scorn for Marie—she was the one, she was defective, not me — bursting to exercise my God-given right to a child and heir. It’s true, it really is — you never want something so much as when somebody tells you you can’t have it. I found myself thinking aloud: “So it would really be half ours, and … and half—”

“That’s right, Mr. Trimpie. And I have already contacted a young woman on your behalf, should you be interested.”

I looked at Marie. Her eyes were watering. She gave me a weak smile and pressed my hand.

“She’s Caucasian, of course, attractive, fit, very bright: a first-year medical student in need of funds to continue her education.”

“Um, uh,” I fumbled for the words, “how much; I mean, if we decide to go along with it, how much would it cost?”

The doctor was ready for this one. “Ten thousand dollars,” he said without hesitation, “plus hospital costs.”

Two days later there was a knock at the door. A girl in peacoat and blue jeans stood there, flanked by a pair of scuffed aquamarine suitcases held shut with masking tape. She looked to be about sixteen, stunted and bony and pale, cheap mother-of-pearl stars for earrings, her red hair short and spiky, as if she were letting a crewcut grow out. I couldn’t help thinking of those World War II movies where they shave the actresses’ heads for consorting with the Germans; I couldn’t help thinking of waifs and wanderers and runaway teen-agers. Dr. Ziss’s gunmetal Mercedes sat at the curb, clouds of exhaust tugging at the tailpipe in the chill morning air; he waved, and then ground away with a crunch of gravel. “Hi,” the girl said, extending her hand, “I’m Wendy.”

It had all been arranged. Dr. Ziss thought it would be a good idea if the mother-to-be came to stay with us two weeks or so before the “procedure,” to give us a chance to get to know one another, and then maybe stay on with us through the first couple of months so we could experience the pregnancy firsthand; when she began to show she’d move into an apartment on the other side of town, so as not to arouse any suspicion among the neighbors. He was delicate about the question of money, figuring a commercial fisherman and a part-time secretary, with no college and driving a beat-up Rambler, might not exactly be rolling in surplus capital. But the money wasn’t a problem really. There was the insurance payoff from Marie’s mother — she’d been blindsided by a semi coming off the ramp on the thruway — and the thirty-five hundred I’d got for delivering spawning stripers to Con Ed so they could hatch fish to replace the ones sucked into the screens at the nuclear plant. It was sitting in the County Trust, collecting five and a quarter percent, against the day some emergency came up. Well, this was it. I closed out the account.

The doctor took his fee and explained that the girl would get five thousand dollars on confirmation of pregnancy, and the balance when she delivered. Hospital costs would run about fifteen hundred dollars, barring complications. We shook hands on it, and Marie and I signed a form. I figured I could work nights at the bottling plant if I was strapped.

Now, with the girl standing there before me, I couldn’t help feeling a stab of disappointment — she was pretty enough, I guess, but I’d expected something a little more, well, substantial. And red hair. It was a letdown. Deep down I’d been hoping for a blonde, one of those Scandinavian types you see in the cigarette ads. Anyway, I told her I was glad to meet her, and then showed her up to the spare room, which I’d cleaned up and outfitted with a chest of drawers, a bed and a Salvation Army desk, and some cheery knickknacks. I asked her if I could get her a bite to eat, Marie being at work and me waiting around for the tide to go out. She was sitting on the bed, looking tired; she hadn’t even bothered to glance out the window at the view of Croton Bay. “Oh yeah,” she said after a minute, as if she’d been asleep or day-dreaming. “Yeah, that would be nice.” Her eyes were gray, the color of drift ice on the river. She called me Nathaniel, soft and formal, like a breathless young schoolteacher taking attendance. Marie never called me anything but Nat, and the guys at the marina settled for Ace. “Have you got a sandwich, maybe? And a cup of hot Nestlé’s? I’d really like that, Nathaniel.”

I went down and fixed her a BLT, her soft syllables tingling in my ears like a kiss. Dr. Ziss had called her an “oh pear” girl, which I guess referred to her shape. When she’d slipped out of her coat I saw that there was more to her than I’d thought — not much across the top, maybe, but sturdy in the hips and thighs. I couldn’t help thinking it was a good sign, but then I had to check myself: I was looking at her like a horse breeder or something.

She was asleep when I stepped in with the sandwich and hot chocolate. I shook her gently and she started up with a gasp, her eyes darting round the room as if she’d forgotten where she was. “Oh yes, yes, thanks,” she said, in that maddening, out-of-breath, little girl’s voice. I sat on the edge of the desk and watched her eat, gratified to see that her teeth were strong and even, and her nose just about right. “So you’re a medical student, Dr. Ziss tells me.”

“Hm-hmm,” she murmured, chewing. “First-year. I’m going to take the spring semester off, I mean for the baby and all—”

This was the first mention of our contract, and it fell over the conversation like a lead balloon. She hesitated, and I turned red. Here I was, alone in the house with a stranger, a pretty girl, and she was going to have my baby.

She went on, skirting the embarrassment, trying to brighten her voice. “I mean, I love it and all — med school — but it’s a grind already and I really don’t see how I can afford the tuition, without, without”—she looked up at me—“without your help.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stared into her eyes for a minute and felt strangely excited, powerful, like a pasha interviewing a new candidate for the harem. Then I picked up the china sturgeon on the desk and turned it over in my hands. “I didn’t go to college,” I said. And then, as if I were apologizing, “I’m a fisherman.”

A cold rain was falling the day the three of us drove down to Dr. Ziss’s for the “procedure.” The maples were turning, the streets splashed with red and gold, slick, glistening, the whole world a cathedral. I felt humbled somehow, respectful in the face of life and the progress of the generations of man: My seed is going to take hold, I kept thinking. In half an hour I’ll be a father. Marie and Wendy, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the whole thing, chattering away like a sewing circle, talking about shoes and needlepoint and some actor’s divorce. They’d hit it off pretty well, the two of them, sitting in the kitchen over coffee at night, going to movies and thrift shops together, trading gossip, looking up at me and giggling when I stepped into the room. Though Wendy didn’t do much around the house — didn’t do much more than lie in bed and stare at textbooks — I don’t think Marie really minded. She was glad for the company, and there was something more too, of course: Wendy was making a big sacrifice for us. Both of us were deeply grateful.

Dr. Ziss was all smiles that afternoon, pumping my hand, kissing the girls, ushering us into his office like an impresario on opening night. Mrs. Goddard was more restrained. She shot me an icy look, as if I was conspiring to overthrow the Pope or corrupt Girl Scouts or something. Meanwhile, the doctor leaned toward Marie and Wendy and said something I didn’t quite catch, and suddenly they were all three of them laughing like Canada geese. Were they laughing at me, I wondered, all at once feeling self-conscious and vulnerable, the odd man out. Dr. Ziss, I noticed, had his arm around Wendy’s waist.

If I felt left out, I didn’t have time to brood over it. Because Mrs. Goddard had me by the elbow and she was marching me down the hallway to the men’s room, where she handed me a condom sealed in tinfoil and a couple of tattered girlie magazines. I didn’t need the magazines. Just the thought of what was going to happen in the next room — Marie had asked the doctor if she could do the insemination herself — gave me an erection like a tire iron. I pictured Wendy leaning back on the examining table in a little white smock, nothing underneath, and Marie, my big loving wife, with this syringelike thing … that’s all it took. I was out of the bathroom in sixty seconds, the wet condom tucked safely away in a sterilized jar.

Afterward, we shared a bottle of pink champagne and a lasagna dinner at Mama’s Pasta House. My treat.

One morning, about a month later, I was lying in bed next to Marie and I heard Wendy pad down the hallway to the bathroom. The house was still, and a soft gray light clung to the window sill like a blanket. I was thinking of nothing, or maybe I was thinking of striped bass, sleek and silver, how they ride up out of the deep like pieces of a dream. Next thing I heard was the sound of gagging. Morning sickness, I thought, picking up on a phrase from one of the countless baby books scattered round the house, and suddenly, inexplicably, I was doubled over myself. “Aaaaargh,” Wendy gasped, the sound echoing through the house, “aaaargh,” and it felt like somebody was pulling my stomach inside out.

At breakfast, she was pale and haggard, her hair greasy and her eyes puffed out. She tried to eat a piece of dry toast, but wound up spitting it into her hand. I couldn’t eat, either. Same thing the next day, and the next: she was sick, I was sick. I’d pull the cord on the outboard and the first whiff of exhaust would turn my stomach and I’d have to lean over and puke in the river. Or I’d haul the gill nets up off the bottom and the exertion would nearly kill me. I called the doctor.

“Sympathetic pregnancy,” he said, his voice cracking at the far end of a bad connection. “Perfectly normal. The husband identifies with the wife’s symptoms.”

“But I’m not her husband.”

“Husband, father: what difference does it make. You’re it.”

I thought about that. Thought about it when Wendy and I began to eat like the New York Jets at the training table, thought about it nights at the bottling plant, thought about it when Wendy came into the living room in her underwear one evening and showed us the hard white bulge that was already beginning to open her navel up like a flower. Marie was watching some sappy hospital show on TV; I was reading about the dead water between Manhattan and Staten Island — nothing living there, not even eels. “Look,” Wendy said, an angels-in-heaven smile on her face, “it’s starting to show.” Marie got up and embraced her. I grinned like an idiot, thrilled at the way the panties grabbed her thighs — white nylon with dancing pink flowers — and how her little pointed breasts were beginning to strain at the brassiere. I wanted to put my tongue in her navel.

Next day, while Marie was at work, I tapped on Wendy’s door. “Come on in,” she said. She was wearing a housecoat, Japanese-y, with dragons and pagodas on it, propped up against the pillows reading an anatomy text. I told her I didn’t feel like going down to the river and wondered if she wanted anything. She put the book down and looked at me like a pat of butter sinking into a halibut steak. “Yes,” she said, stretching it to two syllables, “as a matter of fact I do.” Then she unbuttoned the robe. Later she smiled at me and said: “So what did we need the doctor for, anyway?”

If Marie suspected anything, she didn’t show it. I think she was too caught up in the whole thing to have an evil thought about either one of us. I mean, she doted on Wendy, hung on her every word, came home from work each night and shut herself up in Wendy’s room for an hour or more. I could hear them giggling. When I asked her what the deal was, Marie just shrugged. “You know,” she said, “the usual — girls’ talk and such.” The shared experience had made them close, closer than sisters, and sometimes I would think of us as one big happy family. But I stopped short of telling Marie what was going on when she was out of the house. Once, years ago, I’d had a fling with a girl we’d known in high school — an arrow-faced little fox with starched hair and raccoon eyes. It had been brief and strictly biological, and then the girl had moved to Ohio. Marie never forgot it. Just the mention of Ohio — even so small a thing as the TV weatherman describing a storm over the Midwest — would set her off.

I’d like to say I was torn, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to hurt Marie — she was my wife, my best friend, I loved and respected her — and yet there was Wendy, with her breathy voice and gray eyes, bearing my child. The thought of it, of my son floating around in his own little sea just behind the sweet bulge of her belly … well, it inflamed me, got me mad with lust and passion and spiritual love too. Wasn’t Wendy as much my wife as Marie? Wasn’t marriage, at bottom, simply a tool for procreating the species? Hadn’t Sarah told Abraham to go in unto Hagar? Looking back on it, I guess Wendy let me make love to her because maybe she was bored and a little horny, lying around in a negligee day and night and studying all that anatomy. She sure didn’t feel the way I did — if I know anything, I know that now. But at the time I didn’t think of it that way, I didn’t think at all. Surrogate mother, surrogate wife. I couldn’t get enough of her.

Everything changed when Marie taped a feather bolster around her waist and our “boarder” had to move over to Depew Street. (“Don’t know what happened,” I told the guys down at the Flounder, “she just up and moved out. Low on bucks, I guess.” Nobody so much as looked up from their beer until one of the guys mentioned the Knicks game and Alex DeFazio turned to me and said, “So you got a bun in the oven, is what I hear.”) I was at a loss. What with Marie working full-time now, I found myself stuck in the house, alone, with nothing much to do except wear a path in the carpet and eat my heart out. I could walk down to the river, but it was February and nothing was happening, so I’d wind up at the Flounder Inn with my elbows on the bar, watching the mollies and swordtails bump into the sides of the aquarium, hoping somebody would give me a lift across town. Of course Marie and I would drive over to Wendy’s after dinner every couple of days or so, and I could talk to her on the telephone till my throat went dry — but it wasn’t the same. Even the few times I did get over there in the day, I could feel it. We’d make love, but she seemed shy and reluctant, as if she were performing a duty or something. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Nothing,” she said. It was as if someone had cut a neat little hole in the center of my life.

One time, a stiff windy day in early March, I couldn’t stand the sight of four walls anymore and I walked the six miles across town and all the way out to De-pew Street. It was an ugly day. Clouds like steel wool, a dirty crust of ice underfoot, dog turds preserved like icons in the receding snowbanks. The whole way over there I kept thinking up various scenarios: Wendy and I would take the bus for California, then write Marie to come join us; we’d fly to the Virgin Islands and raise the kid on the beach; Marie would have an accident. When I got there, Dr. Ziss’s Mercedes was parked out front. I thought that was pretty funny, him being there in the middle of the day, but then I told myself he was her doctor after all. I turned around and walked home.

Nathaniel Jr. was born in New York City at the end of June, nine pounds, one ounce, with a fluff of orange hair and milky gray eyes. Wendy never looked so beautiful. The hospital bed was cranked up, her hair, grown out now, was fresh-washed and brushed, she was wearing the turquoise earrings I’d given her. Marie, meanwhile, was experiencing the raptures of the saints. She gave me a look of pride and fulfillment, rocking the baby in her arms, cooing and beaming. I stole a glance at Wendy. There were two wet circles where her nipples touched the front of her gown. When she put Nathaniel to her breast I thought I was going to faint from the beauty of it, and from something else too: jealousy. I wanted her, then and there.

Dr. Ziss was on the scene, of course, all smiles, as if he’d been responsible for the whole thing. He pecked Marie’s cheek, patted the baby’s head, shook my hand, and bent low to kiss Wendy on the lips. I handed him a cigar. Three days later Wendy had her five thousand dollars, the doctor and the hospital had been paid off, and Marie and I were back in Westchester with our son. Wendy had been dressed in a loose summer gown and sandals when I gave her the check. I remember she was sitting there on a lacquered bench, cradling the baby, the hospital corridor lit up like a clerestory with sunbeams. There were tears — mainly Marie’s — and promises to keep in touch. She handed over Nathaniel as if he was a piece of meat or a sack of potatoes, no regrets. She and Marie embraced, she rubbed her cheek against mine and made a perfunctory little kissing noise, and then she was gone.

I held out for a week. Changing diapers, heating formula, snuggling up with Marie and little Nathaniel, trying to feel whole again. But I couldn’t. Every time I looked at my son I saw Wendy, the curl of the lips, the hair, the eyes, the pout — in my distraction, I even thought I heard something of her voice in his gasping howls. Marie was asleep, the baby in her arms. I backed the car out and headed for Depew Street.

The first thing I saw when I rounded the corner onto Depew was the doctor’s Mercedes, unmistakable, gunmetal gray, gleaming at the curb like a slap in the face. I was so startled to see it there I almost ran into it. What was this, some kind of postpartum emergency or something? It was 10:00 A.M. Wendy’s curtains were drawn. As I stamped across the lawn my fingers began to tremble like they do when I’m tugging at the net and I can feel something tugging back.

The door was open. Ziss was sitting there in T-shirt and jeans, watching cartoons on TV and sipping at a glass of milk. He pushed the hair back from his brow and gave me a sheepish grin. “David?” Wendy called from the back room. “David? Are you going out?” I must have looked like the big loser on a quiz show or something, because Ziss, for once, didn’t have anything to say. He just shrugged his shoulders. Wendy’s voice, breathy as a flute, came at us again: “Because if you are, get me some sweetcakes and yogurt, and maybe a couple of corn muffins, okay? I’m hungry as a bear.”

Ziss got up and walked to the bedroom door, mumbled something I couldn’t hear, strode past me without a glance and went on out the back door. I watched him bend for a basketball, dribble around in the dirt, and then cock his arm for a shot at an imaginary basket. On the TV, Sylvester the cat reached into a trash can and pulled out a fish stripped to the bones. Wendy was standing in the doorway. She had nothing to say.

“Look, Wendy,” I began. I felt betrayed, cheated, felt as if I was the brunt of a joke between this girl in the housecoat and the curly-headed hotshot fooling around on the lawn. What was his angle, I wondered, heart pounding at my chest, what was hers? “I suppose you two had a good laugh over me, huh?” She was pouting, the spoiled child. “I fulfilled my part of the bargain.” She had. I got what I’d paid for. But all that had changed, couldn’t she see that? I didn’t want a son, I didn’t want Marie; I wanted her. I told her so. She said nothing. “You’ve got something going with Ziss, right?” I said, my voice rising. “All along, right?”

She looked tired, looked as if she’d been up for a hundred nights running. I watched her shuffle across the room into the kitchenette, glance into the refrigerator, and come up with a jar of jam. She made herself a sandwich, licking the goo from her fingers, and then she told me I stank of fish. She said she couldn’t have a lasting relationship with me because of Marie.

“That’s a lot of crap, and you know it.” I was shouting. Ziss, fifty feet away, turned to look through the open door.

“All right. It’s because we’re—” She put the sandwich down, wiped a smear of jelly from her lip. “Because we move in different circles.”

“You mean because I’m not some fancy-ass doctor, because I didn’t go to college.”

She nodded. Slow and deliberate, no room for argument, she held my eyes and nodded.

I couldn’t help it. Something just came loose in my head, and the next second I was out the door, knocking Ziss into the dirt. He kicked and scratched, tried to bite me on the wrist, but I just took hold of his hair and laid into his face while Wendy ran around in her Japanese housecoat, screeching like a cat in heat. By the time the police got there I’d pretty well closed up both his eyes and rearranged his dental work. Wendy was bending over him with a bottle of rubbing alcohol when they put the cuffs on me.

Next morning there was a story in the paper. Marie sent Alex DeFazio down with the bail money, and then she wouldn’t let me in the house. I banged on the door halfheartedly, then tried one of the windows, only to find she’d nailed it shut. When I saw that, I was just about ready to explode, but then I figured what the hell and fired up the Rambler in a cloud of blue smoke. Cops, dogs, kids, and pedestrians be damned, I ran it like a stock car eight blocks down to the dock and left it steaming in the parking lot. Five minutes later I was planing across the river, a wide brown furrow fanning out behind me.

This was my element, sun, wind, water, life pared down to the basics. Gulls hung in the air like puppets on a wire, spray flew up in my face, the shore sank back into my wake until docks and pleasure boats and clapboard houses were swallowed up and I was alone on the broad gray back of the river. After a while I eased up on the throttle and began scanning the surface for the buoys that marked my gill nets, working by rote, the tight-wound spool in my chest finally beginning to pay out. Then I spotted them, white and red, jogged by the waves. I cut the engine, coasted in and caught hold of the nearest float.

Wendy, I thought, as I hauled at the ropes, ten years, twenty-five, a lifetime: every time I look at my son I’ll see your face. Hand over hand, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, the net heaving up out of the swirling brown depths with its pounds of flesh. But then I wasn’t thinking about Wendy anymore, or Marie or Nathaniel Jr. — I was thinking about the bottom of the river, I was thinking about fins and scales and cold lidless eyes. The instant I touched the lead rope I knew I was on to something. This time of year it would be sturgeon, big as logs, long-nosed and barbeled, coasting up the riverbed out of some dim watery past, anadromous, preprogrammed, homing in on their spawning grounds like guided missiles. Just then I felt a pulsing in the soles of my sneakers and turned to glance up at the Day Liner, steaming by on its way to Bear Mountain, hundreds of people with picnic baskets and coolers, waving. I jerked at the net like a penitent.

There was a single sturgeon in the net, tangled up like a ball of string. It was dead. I strained to haul the thing aboard, six feet long, two hundred pounds. Cold from the depths, still supple, it hadn’t been dead more than an hour — while I banged at my own front door, locked out, it had been thrashing in the dark, locked in. The gulls swooped low, mocking me. I had to cut it out of the net.

Back at the dock I got one of the beer drinkers to give me a hand and we dragged the fish over to the skinning pole. With sturgeon, we hang them by the gills from the top of a ten-foot pole, and then we peel back the scutes like you’d peel a banana. Four or five of the guys stood there watching me, nobody saying anything. I cut all the way round the skin just below the big stiff gill plates and then made five vertical slits the length of the fish. Flies settled on the blade of the knife. The sun beat at the back of my head. I remember there was a guy standing there, somebody I’d never seen before, a guy in a white shirt with a kid about eight or so. The kid was holding a fishing pole. They stepped back, both of them, when I tore the first strip of skin from the fish.

Sturgeon peels back with a raspy, nails-on-the-blackboard sort of sound, reminds me of tearing up sheets or ripping bark from a tree. I tossed the curling strips of leather in a pile, flies sawing away at the air, the big glistening pink carcass hanging there like a skinned deer, blood and flesh. Somebody handed me a beer: it stuck to my hand and I drained it in a gulp. Then I turned to gut the fish, me a doctor, the knife a scalpel, and suddenly I was digging into the vent like Jack the Ripper, slitting it all the way up to the gills in a single violent motion.

“How do you like that?” the man in the white shirt said. “She’s got eggs in her.”

I glanced down. There they were, wet, beaded and gray, millions of them, the big clusters tearing free and dropping to the ground like ripe fruit. I cupped my hands and held the trembling mass of it there against the gashed belly, fifty or sixty pounds of the stuff, slippery roe running through my fingers like the silver coins from a slot machine, like a jackpot.

(1981)

ALL SHOOK UP

About a week after the FOR RENT sign disappeared from the window of the place next door, a van the color of cough syrup swung off the blacktop road and into the driveway. The color didn’t do much for me, nor the oversize tires with the raised white letters, but the side panel was a real eye-catcher. It featured a life-size portrait of a man with high-piled hair and a guitar, beneath which appeared the legend Young Elvis, The Boy Who Dared To Rock. When the van pulled in I was sitting in the kitchen, rereading the newspaper and blowing into my eighth cup of coffee. I was on vacation. My wife was on vacation too. Only she was in Mill Valley, California, with a guy named Fred, and I was in Shrub Oak, New York.

The door of the van eased open and a kid about nineteen stepped out. He was wearing a black leather jacket with the collar turned up, even though it must have been ninety, and his hair was a glistening, blue-black construction of grease and hair spray that rose from the crown of his head like a bird’s nest perched atop a cliff. The girl got out on the far side and then ducked round the van to stand gaping at the paint-blistered Cape Cod as if it were Graceland itself. She was small-boned and tentative, her big black-rimmed eyes like puncture wounds. In her arms, as slack and yielding as a bag of oranges, was a baby. It couldn’t have been more than six months old.

I fished three beers out of the refrigerator, slapped through the screen door, and crossed the lawn to where they stood huddled in the driveway, looking lost. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said, proffering the beers.

The kid was wearing black ankle boots. He ground the toe of the right one into the pavement as if stubbing out a cigarette, then glanced up and said, “I don’t drink.”

“How about you?” I said, grinning at the girl.

“Sure, thanks,” she said, reaching out a slim, veiny hand bright with lacquered nails. She gave the kid a glance, then took the beer, saluted me with a wink, and raised it to her lips. The baby never stirred.

I felt awkward with the two open bottles, so I gingerly set one down on the grass, then straightened up and took a hit from the other. “Patrick,” I said, extending my free hand.

The kid took my hand and nodded, a bright wet spit curl swaying loose over his forehead. “Joey Greco,” he said. “Glad to meet you. This here is Cindy.”

There was something peculiar about his voice — tone and accent both. For one thing, it was surprisingly deep, as if he were throwing his voice or doing an impersonation. Then too, I couldn’t quite place the accent. I gave Cindy a big welcoming smile and turned back to him. “You from down South?” I said.

The toe began to grind again and the hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, but he suppressed it. When he looked up at me his eyes were alive. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

A jay flew screaming out of the maple in back of the house, wheeled overhead, and disappeared in the hedge. I took another sip of beer. My face was beginning to ache from grinning so much and I could feel the sweat leaching out of my armpit and into my last clean T-shirt.

“No,” he said again, and his voice was pitched a shade higher. “I’m from Brooklyn.”

Two days later I was out back in the hammock, reading a thriller about a double agent who turns triple agent for a while, is discovered, pursued, captured, and finally persuaded under torture to become a quadruple agent, at which point his wife leaves him and his children change their surname. I was also drinking my way through a bottle of Chivas Regal Fred had given my wife for Christmas, and contemplatively rubbing tanning butter into my navel. The doorbell took me by surprise. I sat up, plucked a leaf from the maple for a bookmark, and padded round the house in bare feet and paint-stained cutoffs.

Cindy was standing at the front door, her back to me, peering through the screen. At first I didn’t recognize her: she looked waifish, lost, a Girl Scout peddling cookies in a strange neighborhood. Just as I was about to say something, she pushed the doorbell again. “Hello,” she called, cupping her hands and leaning into the screen.

The chimes tinnily reproduced the first seven notes of “Camptown Races,” an effect my wife had found endearing; I made a mental note to disconnect them first thing in the morning. “Anybody home?” Cindy called.

“Hello,” I said, and watched her jump. “Looking for me?”

“Oh,” she gasped, swinging round with a laugh. “Hi.” She was wearing a halter top and gym shorts, her hair was pinned up, and her perfect little toes looked freshly painted. “Patrick, right?” she said. “That’s right,” I said. “And you’re Cindy.”

She nodded, and gave me the sort of look you get from a haberdasher when you go in to buy a suit. “Nice tan.”

I glanced down at my feet, rubbed a slick hand across my chest. “I’m on vacation.”

“That’s great,” she said. “From what?”

“I work up at the high school? I’m in Guidance.”

“Oh, wow,” she said, “that’s really great.” She stepped down off the porch. “I really mean it — that’s something.” And then: “Aren’t you kind of young to be a guidance counselor?”

“I’m twenty-nine.”

“You’re kidding, right? You don’t look it. Really. I would’ve thought you were twenty-five, maybe, or something.” She patted her hair tentatively, once around, as if to make sure it was all still there. “Anyway, what I came over to ask is if you’d like to come to dinner over at our place tonight.”

I was half drunk, the thriller wasn’t all that thrilling, and I hadn’t been out of the yard in four days. “What time?” I said.

“About six.”

There was a silence, during which the birds could be heard cursing one another in the trees. Down the block someone fired up a rotary mower. “Well, listen, I got to go put the meat up,” she said, turning to leave. But then she swung round with an afterthought. “I forgot to ask: are you married?”

She must have seen the hesitation on my face.

“Because if you are, I mean, we want to invite her too.” She stood there watching me. Her eyes were gray, and there was a violet clock in the right one. The hands pointed to three-thirty.

“Yes,” I said finally, “I am.” There was the sound of a stinging ricochet and a heartfelt guttural curse as the unseen mower hit a stone. “But my wife’s away. On vacation.”

I’d been in the house only once before, nearly eight years back. The McCareys had lived there then, and Judy and I had just graduated from the state teachers’ college. We’d been married two weeks, the world had been freshly created from out of the void, and we were moving into our new house. I was standing in the driveway, unloading boxes of wedding loot from the trunk of the car, when Henry McCarey ambled across the lawn to introduce himself. He must have been around seventy-five. His pale, bald brow swept up and back from his eyes like a helmet, square and imposing, but the flesh had fallen in on itself from the cheekbones down, giving his face a mismatched look. He wore wire-rim glasses. “If you’ve got a minute there,” he said, “we’d like to show you and your wife something.” I looked up. Henry’s wife, Irma, stood framed in the doorway behind him. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and she wore a print dress that fell to the tops of her white sweat socks.

I called Judy. She smiled, I smiled, Henry smiled; Irma, smiling, held the door for us, and we found ourselves in the dark, cluttered living room with its excess furniture, its framed photographs of eras gone by, and its bric-a-brac. Irma asked us if we’d like a cup of tea. “Over here,” Henry said, gesturing from the far corner of the room.

We edged forward, smiling but ill at ease. We were twenty-two, besotted with passion and confidence, and these people made our grandparents look young. I didn’t know what to say to them, didn’t know how to act: I wanted to get back to the car and the boxes piled on the lawn.

Henry was standing before a glass case that stood atop a mound of doilies on a rickety-looking corner table. He fumbled behind it for a moment, and then a little white Christmas bulb flickered on inside the case. I saw a silver trowellike thing with an inscription on it and a rippled, petrified chunk of something that looked as if it might once have been organic. It was a moment before I realized it was a piece of wedding cake.

“It’s from our golden anniversary,” Henry said, “six years ago. And that there is the cake knife — can you read what it says?”

I felt numb, felt as if I’d been poking around in the dirt and unearthed the traces of a forgotten civilization. I stole a look at Judy. She was transfixed, her face drawn up as if she were about to cry: she was so beautiful, so rapt, so moved by the moment and its auguries, that I began to feel choked up myself. She took my hand.

“It says ‘Henry and Irma, 1926–1976, Semper Fidelis.’ That last bit, that’s Latin,” Henry added, and then he translated for us.

Things were different now.

I rapped at the flimsy aluminum storm door and Joey bobbed into view through the dark mesh of the screen. He was wearing a tight black sportcoat with the collar turned up, a pink shirt, and black pants with jagged pink lightning bolts ascending the outer seam. At first he didn’t seem to recognize me, and for an instant, standing there in my cutoffs and T-shirt with half a bottle of Chivas in my hand, I felt more like an interloper than an honored guest — she had said tonight, hadn’t she? — but then he was ducking his head in greeting and swinging back the door to admit me.

“Glad you could make it,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Yeah, me too,” I breathed, wondering if I was making a mistake.

I followed him into the living room, where spavined boxes and green plastic trash bags stuffed with underwear and sweaters gave testimony to an ongoing adventure in moving. The place was as close and dark as I’d remembered, but where before there’d been doilies, bric-a-brac, and end tables with carved feet, now there was a plaid sofa, an exercycle, and a dirty off-white beanbag lounger. Gone was the shrine to marital fidelity, replaced by a Fender amp, a microphone stand, and an acoustic guitar with capo and pickup. (Henry was gone too, dead of emphysema, and Irma was in a nursing home on the other side of town.) There was a stereo with great black monolithic speakers, and the walls were hung with posters of Elvis. I looked at Joey. He was posed beside a sneering young Elvis, rocking back and forth on the heels of his boots. “Pretty slick,” I said, indicating his get-up.

“Oh this?” he said, as if surprised I’d noticed. “I’ve been rehearsing — trying on outfits, you know.”

I’d figured he was some sort of Elvis impersonator, judging from the van, the clothes, and the achieved accent, but aside from the hair I couldn’t really see much resemblance between him and the King. “You, uh — you do an Elvis act?”

He looked at me as if I’d just asked if the thing above our heads was the ceiling. Finally he just said, “Yeah.”

It was then that Cindy emerged from the kitchen. She was wearing a white peasant dress and sandals, and she was holding a glass of wine in one hand and a zucchini the size of a souvenir baseball bat in the other. “Patrick,” she said, crossing the room to brush my cheek with a kiss. I embraced her ritualistically — you might have thought we’d known each other for a decade — and held her a moment while Joey and Elvis looked on. When she stepped back, I caught a whiff of perfume and alcohol. “You like zucchini?” she said.

“Uh-huh, sure.” I was wondering what to do with my hands. Suddenly I remembered the bottle and held it up like a turkey I’d shot in the woods. “I brought you this.”

Cindy made a gracious noise or two, I shrugged in deprecation—“It’s only half full,” I said — and Joey ground his toe into the carpet. I might have been imagining it, but he seemed agitated, worked up over something.

“How long till dinner?” he said, a reedy, adolescent whine snaking through the Nashville basso.

Cindy’s eyes were unsteady. She drained her wine in a gulp and held out the glass for me to refill. With Scotch. “I don’t know,” she said, watching the glass. “Half an hour.”

“Because I think I want to work on a couple numbers, you know?”

She gave him a look. I didn’t know either of them well enough to know what it meant. That look could have said, “Go screw yourself,” or “I’m just wild about you and Elvis”—I couldn’t tell.

“No problem,” she said finally, sipping at her drink, the zucchini tucked under her arm. “Patrick was going to help me in the kitchen, anyway — right, Patrick?”

“Sure,” I said.

At dinner, Joey cut into his braciola, lifted a forkful of tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini to his lips, and talked about Elvis. “He was the most photographed man in the history of the world. He had sixty-two cars and over a hundred guitars.” Fork, knife, meat, vegetable. “He was the greatest there ever was.”

I didn’t know about that. By the time I gave up pellet guns and minibikes and began listening to rock and roll, it was the Doors, Stones, and Hendrix, and Elvis was already degenerating into a caricature of himself. I remembered him as a bloated old has-been in a white jumpsuit, crooning corny ballads and slobbering on middle-aged women. Besides, between the Chivas and the bottle of red Cindy had opened for dinner, I was pretty far gone. “Hmph,” was about all I could manage.

For forty-five minutes, while I’d sat on a cracked vinyl barstool at the kitchen counter, helping slice vegetables and trading stories with Cindy, I’d heard Joey’s rendition of half a dozen Elvis classics. He was in the living room, thundering; I was in the kitchen, drinking. Every once in a while he’d give the guitar a rest or step back from the microphone, and I would hear the real Elvis moaning faintly in the background: Don’t be cruel / To a heart that’s true or You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.

“He’s pretty good,” I said to Cindy after a particularly thunderous rendition of “Jailhouse Rock.” I was making conversation.

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so,” she said. The baby lay in a portable cradle by the window, giving off subtle emanations of feces and urine. It was asleep, I supposed. If it weren’t for the smell, I would have guessed it was dead. “You know, we had to get married,” she said.

I made a gesture of dismissal, tried for a surprised expression. Of course they’d had to get married. I’d seen a hundred girls just like her — they passed through the guidance office like flocks of unfledged birds flying in the wrong direction, north in the winter, south in the summer. Slumped over, bony, eyes sunk into their heads, and made up like showgirls or whores, they slouched in the easy chair in my office and told me their stories. They thought they were hip and depraved, thought they were nihilists and libertines, thought they’d invented sex. Two years later they were housewives with preschoolers and station wagons. Two years after that they were divorced.

“First time I heard Elvis, first time I remember, anyway,” Joey was saying now, “was in December of ‘68 when he did that TV concert — the Singer Special? It blew me away. I just couldn’t believe it.”

“Sixty-eight?” I echoed. “What were you, four?”

Cindy giggled. I turned to look at her, a sloppy grin on my face. I was drunk.

Joey didn’t bat an eye. “I was seven,” he said. And then: “That was the day I stopped being a kid.” He’d tucked a napkin under his collar to protect his pink shirt, and strands of hair hung loose over his forehead. “Next day my mom picked up a copy of Elvis’s Greatest Hits, Volume One, and a week later she got me my first guitar. I’ve been at it ever since.”

Joey was looking hard at me. He was trying to impress me; that much was clear. That’s why he’d worn the suit, dabbed his lids with green eye shadow, greased his hair, and hammered out his repertoire from the next room so I couldn’t help but catch every lick. Somehow, though, I wasn’t impressed. Whether it was the booze, my indifference to Elvis, or the fear and loathing that had gripped me since Judy’s defection, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I didn’t give a shit. For Elvis, for Joey, for Fred, Judy, Little Richard, or Leonard Bernstein. For anybody. I sipped my wine in silence.

“My agent’s trying to book me into the Catskills — some of the resorts and all, you know? He says my act’s really hot.” Joey patted his napkin, raised a glass of milk to his lips, and took a quick swallow. “I’ll be auditioning up there at Brown’s in about a week. Meanwhile, Friday night I got this warm-up gig — no big deal, just some dump out in the sticks. It’s over in Brewster — you ever heard of it?”

“The sticks, or Brewster?” I said.

“No, really, why not drop by?”

Cindy was watching me. Earlier, over the chopping board, she’d given me the rundown on this and other matters. She was twenty, Joey was twenty-one. Her father owned a contracting company in Putnam Valley and had set them up with the house. She’d met Joey in Brooklyn the summer before, when she was staying with her cousin. He was in a band then. Now he did Elvis. Nothing but. He’d had gigs in the City and out on the Island, but he wasn’t making anything and he refused to take a day job: nobody but hacks did that. So they’d come to the hinterlands, where her father could see they didn’t starve to death and Cindy could work as a secretary in his office. They were hoping the Brewster thing would catch on — nobody was doing much with Elvis up here.

I chewed, swallowed, washed it down with a swig of wine. “Sounds good, I said. I’ll be there.”

Later, after Joey had gone to bed, Cindy and I sat side by side on the plaid sofa and listened to a tape of Swan Lake I’d gone next door to fetch (“Something soft,” she’d said. “Have you got something soft?”). We were drinking coffee, and a sweet yellowish cordial she’d dug out of one of the boxes of kitchen things. We’d been talking. I’d told her about Judy. And Fred. Told her I’d been feeling pretty rotten and that I was glad she’d moved in. “Really,” I said, “I mean it. And I really appreciate you inviting me over too.”

She was right beside me, her arms bare in the peasant dress, legs folded under her yoga-style. “No problem,” she said, looking me in the eye.

I glanced away and saw Elvis. Crouching, dipping, leering, humping the microphone, and spraying musk over the first three rows, Elvis in full rut. “So how do you feel about all this”—I waved my arm to take in the posters, the guitar and amp, the undefined space above us where Joey lay sleeping—“I mean, living with the King?” I laughed and held my cupped hand under her chin. “Go ahead, dear — speak right into the mike.”

She surprised me then. Her expression was dead serious, no time for levity. Slowly, deliberately, she set down her coffee cup and leaned forward to swing round so that she was kneeling beside me on the couch; then she kicked her leg out as if mounting a horse and brought her knee softly down between my legs until I could feel the pressure lighting up my groin. From the stereo, I could hear the swan maidens bursting into flight. “It’s like being married to a clone,” she whispered.

When I got home, the phone was ringing. I slammed through the front door, stumbled over something in the dark, and took the stairs to the bedroom two at a time. “Yeah?” I said breathlessly as I snatched up the receiver.

“Pat?”

It was Judy. Before I could react, her voice was coming at me, soft and passionate, syllables kneading me like fingers. “Pat, listen,” she said. “I want to explain something—”

I hung up.

The club was called Delvecchio’s, and it sat amid an expanse of blacktop like a cruise ship on a flat, dark sea. It was a big place, with two separate stages, a disco, three bars, and a game room. I recognized it instantly: teen nirvana. Neon pulsed, raked Chevys rumbled out front, guys in Hawaiian shirts and girls in spike heels stood outside the door, smoking joints and cigarettes and examining one another with frozen eyes. The parking lot was already beginning to fill up when Cindy and I pulled in around nine.

“Big on the sixteen-year-old crowd tonight,” I said. “Want me to gun the engine?”

Cindy was wearing a sleeveless blouse, pedal pushers, and heels. She’d made herself up to look like a cover girl for Slash magazine, and she smelled like a candy store. “Come on, Pat,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t be that way.”

“What way?” I said, but I knew what she meant. We were out to have a good time, to hear Joey on his big night, and there was no reason to kill it with cynicism.

Joey had gone on ahead in the van to set up his equipment and do a sound check. Earlier, he’d made a special trip over to my place to ask if I’d mind taking Cindy to the club. He stood just inside the door, working the toe of his patent-leather boot and gazing beyond me to the wreckage wrought by Judy’s absence: the cardboard containers of takeout Chinese stacked atop the TV, the beer bottles and Devil Dog wrappers on the coffee table, the clothes scattered about like the leavings of a river in flood. I looked him in the eye, wondering just how much he knew of the passionate groping Cindy and I had engaged in while he was getting his beauty rest the other night, wondering if he had even the faintest notion that I felt evil and betrayed and wanted his wife because I had wounds to salve and because she was there, wanted her like forbidden fruit, wanted her like I’d wanted half the knocked-up, washed-out, defiant little twits who paraded through my office each year. He held my gaze until I looked away. “Sure,” I murmured, playing Tristan to his Mark. “Be happy to.”

And so, come eight o’clock, I’d showered and shaved, slicked back my hair, turned up the collar of my favorite gigolo shirt, and strolled across the lawn to pick her up. The baby (her name was Gladys, after Elvis’s mother) was left in the care of one of the legions of pubescent girls I knew from school, Cindy emerged from the bedroom on brisk heels to peck my cheek with a kiss, and we strolled back across the lawn to my car.

There was an awkward silence. Though we’d talked two or three times since the night of the braciola and the couch, neither of us had referred to it. We’d done some pretty heavy petting and fondling, we’d got the feel of each other’s dentition and a taste of abandon. I was the one who backed off. I had a vision of Joey standing in the doorway in his pajamas, head bowed under the weight of his pompadour. “What about Joey,” I whispered, and we both swiveled our heads to gaze up at the flat, unrevealing surface of the ceiling. Then I got up and went home to bed.

Now, as we reached the car and I swung back the door for her, I found something to say. “I can’t believe it”—I laughed, hearty, jocular, all my teeth showing—“but I feel like I’m out on a date or something.”

Cindy just cocked her head and gave me a little smirk. “You are,” she said.

They’d booked Joey into the Troubadour Room, a place that seated sixty or seventy and had the atmosphere of a small club. Comedians played there once in a while, and the occasional folk singer or balladeer — acts that might be expected to draw a slightly older, more contemplative crowd. Most of the action, obviously, centered on the rock bands that played the main stage, or the pounding fantasia of the disco. We didn’t exactly have to fight for a seat.

Cindy ordered a Black Russian. I stuck with Scotch. We talked about Elvis, Joey, rock and roll. We talked about Gladys and how precocious she was and how her baby raptures alternated with baby traumas. We talked about the water-colors Cindy had done in high school and how she’d like to get back to them. We talked about Judy. About Fred. About guidance counseling. We were on our third drink — or maybe it was the fourth — when the stage lights went up and the emcee announced Joey.

“Excited?” I said.

She shrugged, scanning the stage a moment as the drummer, bass player, and guitarist took their places. Then she found my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze.

At that moment Joey whirled out of the wings and pounced on the mike as if it were alive. He was dressed in a mustard-colored suit spangled with gold glitter, a sheeny gold tie, and white patent-leather loafers. For a moment he just stood there, trying his best to radiate the kind of outlaw sensuality that was Elvis’s signature, but managing instead to look merely awkward, like a kid dressed up for a costume party. Still, he knew the moves. Suddenly his right fist shot up over his head and the musicians froze; he gave us his best sneer, then the fist came crashing down across the face of his guitar, the band lurched into “Heartbreak Hotel,” and Joey threw back his head and let loose.

Nothing happened.

The band rumbled on confusedly for a bar or two, then cut out as Joey stood there tapping at the microphone and looking foolish.

“AC/DC!” someone shouted from the darkness to my left.

“Def Leppard!”

The emcee, a balding character in a flowered shirt, scurried out onstage and crouched over the pedestal of the antiquated mike Joey had insisted on for authenticity. Someone shouted an obscenity, and Joey turned his back. There were more calls for heavy-metal bands, quips and laughter. The other band members — older guys with beards and expressionless faces — looked about as concerned as sleepwalkers. I stole a look at Cindy; she was biting her lip.

Finally the mike came to life, the emcee vanished, and Joey breathed “Testing, testing,” through the PA system. “Ah’m sorry ‘bout the de-lay, folks,” he murmured in his deepest, backwoodsiest basso, “but we’re ‘bout ready to give it another shot. A-one, two, three!” he shouted, and “Heartbreak Hotel,” take two, thumped lamely through the speakers:

Well, since my baby left me,

I found a new place to dwell,

It’s down at the end of Lonely Street,

That’s Heartbreak Hotel.

Something was wrong, that much was clear from the start. It wasn’t just that he was bad, that he looked nervous and maybe a bit effeminate and out of control, or that he forgot the words to the third verse and went flat on the choruses, or that the half-assed pickup band couldn’t have played together if they’d rehearsed eight hours a day since Elvis was laid in his grave — no, it went deeper than that. The key to the whole thing was in creating an illusion — Joey had to convince his audience, for even an instant, that the real flesh-and-blood Elvis, the boy who dared to rock, stood before them. Unfortunately, he just couldn’t cut it. Musically or visually. No matter if you stopped your ears and squinted till the lights blurred, this awkward, greasy-haired kid in the green eye shadow didn’t come close, not even for a second. And the audience let him know it.

Hoots and catcalls drowned out the last chord of “Heartbreak Hotel,” as Joey segued into one of those trembly, heavy-breathing ballads that were the bane of the King’s middle years. I don’t remember the tune or the lyrics — but it was sappy and out of key. Joey was sweating now, and the hair hung down in his eyes. He leaned into the microphone, picked a woman out of the audience, and attempted a seductive leer that wound up looking more like indigestion than passion. Midway through the song a female voice shouted “Faggot!” from the back of the room, and two guys in fraternity jackets began to howl like hound dogs in heat.

Joey faltered, missed his entrance after the guitar break, and had to stand there strumming over nothing for a whole verse and chorus till it came round again. People were openly derisive now, and the fraternity guys, encouraged, began to intersperse their howls with yips and yodels. Joey bowed his head, as if in defeat, and let the guitar dangle loose as the band closed out the number. He picked up the tempo a bit on the next one—“Teddy Bear,” I think it was — but he never got anywhere with the audience. I watched Cindy out of the corner of my eye. Her face was white. She sat through the first four numbers wordlessly, then leaned across the table and took hold of my arm. “Take me home,” she said.

We sat in the driveway awhile, listening to the radio. It was warm, and with the windows rolled down we could hear the crickets and whatnot going at it in the bushes. Cindy hadn’t said much on the way back — the scene at the club had been pretty devastating — and I’d tried to distract her with a line of happy chatter. Now she reached forward and snapped off the radio. “He really stinks, doesn’t he?” she said.

I wasn’t biting. I wanted her, yes, but I wasn’t about to run anybody down to get her. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, with that band Elvis himself would’ve stunk.”

She considered this a moment, then fished around in her purse for a cigarette, lit it, and expelled the smoke with a sigh. The sigh seemed to say: “Okay, and what now?” We both knew that the babysitter was hunkered down obliviously in front of the TV next door and that Joey still had another set to get through. We had hours. If we wanted them.

The light from her place fell across the lawn and caught in her hair; her face was in shadow. “You want to go inside a minute?” I said, remembering the way she’d moved against me on the couch. “Have a drink or something?”

When she said “Sure,” I felt my knees go weak. This was it: counselor, counsel thyself. I followed her into the house and led her up the dark stairs to the bedroom. We didn’t bother with the drink. Or lights. She felt good, and a little strange: she wasn’t Judy.

I got us a drink afterward, and then another. Then I brought the bottle to bed with me and we made love again — a slow, easeful, rhythmic love, the crickets keeping time from beyond the windows. I was ecstatic. I was. drunk. I was in love. We moved together and I was tonguing her ear and serenading her in a passionate whisper, mimicking Elvis, mimicking Joey. “Well-a bless-a my soul, what’s-a wrong with me,” I murmured, “I’m itchin’ like a ma-han on a fuzzy tree … oh-oh-oh, oh, oh yeah.” She laughed, and then she got serious. We shared a cigarette and a shot of sticky liqueur afterward; then I must have drifted off.

I don’t know what time it was when I heard the van pull in next door. Downstairs the door slammed and I went to the window to watch Cindy’s dark form hurrying across the lawn. Then I saw Joey standing in the doorway, the babysitter behind him. There was a curse, a shout, the sound of a blow, and then Joey and the babysitter were in the van, the brake lights flashed, and they were gone.

I felt bad. I felt like a dog, a sinner, a homewrecker, and a Lothario. I felt like Fred must have felt. Naked, in the dark, I poured myself another drink and watched Cindy’s house for movement. There was none. A minute later I was asleep.

I woke early. My throat was dry and my head throbbed. I slipped into a pair of running shorts I found in the clutter on the floor, brushed my teeth, rinsed my face, and contemplated the toilet for a long while, trying to gauge whether or not I was going to vomit.

Half a dozen aspirin and three glasses of water later, I stepped gingerly down the stairs. I was thinking poached eggs and dry toast — and maybe, if I could take it, half a cup of coffee — when I drifted into the living room and saw her huddled there on the couch. Her eyes were red, her makeup smeared, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before. Beside her, wrapped in a pink blanket the size of a bath towel, was the baby.

“Cindy?”

She shoved the hair back from her face and narrowed her eyes, studying me. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she murmured.

“You mean, he—?”

I should have held her, I guess, should have probed deep in my counselor’s lexicon for words of comfort and assurance, but I couldn’t. Conflicting thoughts were running through my head, acid rose in my throat, and the baby, conscious for the first time since I’d laid eyes on it, was fixing me with a steady, unblinking gaze of accusation. This wasn’t what I’d wanted, not at all.

“Listen,” I said, “can I get you anything — a cup of coffee or some cereal or something? Milk for the baby?”

She shook her head and began to make small sounds of grief and anguish. She bit her lip and averted her face.

I felt like a criminal. “God,” I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t—” I started for her, hoping she’d raise her tear-stained face to me, tell me it wasn’t my fault, rise bravely from the couch, and trudge off across the lawn and out of my life.

At that moment there was a knock at the door. We both froze. It came again, louder, booming, the sound of rage and impatience. I crossed the room, swung open the door, and found Joey on the doorstep. He was pale, and his hair was in disarray. When the door pulled back, his eyes locked on mine with a look of hatred and contempt. I made no move to open the storm door that separated us.

“You want her?” he said, and he ground the toe of his boot into the welcome mat like a ram pawing the earth before it charges.

I had six inches and forty pounds on him; I could have shoved through the door and drowned my guilt in blood. But it wasn’t Joey I wanted to hurt, it was Fred. Or, no, deep down, at the root of it all, it was Judy I wanted to hurt. I glanced into his eyes through the flimsy mesh of the screen and then looked away.

“’Cause you can have her,” he went on, dropping the Nashville twang and reverting to pure Brooklynese. “She’s a whore. I don’t need no whore. Shit,” he spat, looking beyond me to where she sat huddled on the couch with the baby. “Elvis went through a hundred just like her. A thousand.”

Cindy was staring at the floor. I had nothing to say.

“Fuck you both,” he said finally, then turned and marched across the lawn. I watched him slam into the van, fire up the engine, and back out of the driveway. Then the boy who dared to rock was gone.

I looked at Cindy. Her knees were drawn up under her chin and she was crying softly. I knew I should comfort her, tell her it would be all right and that everything would work out fine. But I didn’t. This was no pregnant fifteen-year-old who hated her mother or a kid who skipped cheerleading practice to smoke pot and hang out at the video arcade — this wasn’t a problem that would walk out of my office and go home by itself. No, the problem was at my doorstep, here on my couch: I was involved — I was responsible — and I wanted no part of it.

“Patrick,” she stammered finally. “I–I don’t know what to say. I mean”—and here she was on the verge of tears again—“I feel as if … as if—”

I didn’t get to hear how she felt. Not then, anyway. Because at that moment the phone began to ring. From upstairs, in the bedroom. Cindy paused in mid-phrase; I froze. The phone rang twice, three times. We looked at each other. On the fourth ring I turned and bounded up the stairs.

“Hello?”

“Pat, listen to me.” It was Judy. She sounded breathless, as if she’d been running. “Now don’t hang up. Please.”

The blood was beating in my head. The receiver weighed six tons. I struggled to hold it to my ear.

“I made a mistake,” she said. “I know it. Fred’s a jerk. I left him three days ago in some winery in St. Helena.” There was a pause. “I’m down in Monterey now and I’m lonely. I miss you.”

I held my breath.

“Pat?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m coming home, okay?”

I thought of Joey, of Cindy downstairs with her baby. I glanced out the window at the place next door, vacant once again, and thought of Henry and Irma and the progress of the years. And then I felt something give way, as if a spell had been broken.

“Okay,” I said.

(1983)

I DATED JANE AUSTEN

Her hands were cold. She held them out for me as I stepped into the parlor. “Mr. Boyle,” announced the maid, and Jane was rising to greet me, her cold white hands like an offering. I took them, said my good evenings, and nodded at each of the pairs of eyes ranged round the room. There were brothers, smallish and large of head, whose names I didn’t quite catch; there was her father, the Reverend, and her sister, the spinster. They stared at me like sharks on the verge of a feeding frenzy. I was wearing my pink boots, my “Great Disasters” T-shirt and my Tiki medallion. My shoulders slumped under the scrutiny. My wit evaporated.

“Have a seat, son,” said the Reverend, and I backed onto a settee between two brothers. Jane retreated to an armchair on the far side of the room. Cassandra, the spinster, plucked up her knitting. One of the brothers sighed. I could see it coming, with the certainty and illogic of an aboriginal courtship rite: a round of polite chit-chat.

The Reverend cleared his throat. “So what do you think of Mrs. Radcliffe’s new book?”

I balanced a glass of sherry on my knee. The Reverend, Cassandra and the brothers revolved tiny spoons around the rims of teacups. Jane nibbled at a croissant and focused her huge unblinking eyes on the side of my face. One of the brothers had just made a devastating witticism at the expense of the Lyrical Ballads and was still tittering over it. Somewhere cats were purring and clocks ticking. I glanced at my watch: only seventeen minutes since I’d stepped in the door.

I stood. “Well, Reverend,” I said, “I think it’s time Jane and I hit the road.” He looked up at the doomed Hindenburg blazing across my chest and smacked his lips. “But you’ve only just arrived.”

There really wasn’t much room for Cassandra in the Alfa Romeo, but the Reverend and his troop of sons insisted that she come along. She hefted her skirts, wedged herself into the rear compartment and flared her parasol, while Jane pulled a white cap down over her curls and attempted a joke about Phaetons and the winds of Aeolus. The Reverend stood at the curb and watched my fingers as I helped Jane fasten her seat belt, and then we were off with a crunch of gravel and a billow of exhaust.

The film was Italian, in black and white, full of social acuity and steamy sex. I sat between the two sisters with a bucket of buttered popcorn. Jane’s lips were parted and her eyes glowed. I offered her some popcorn. “I do not think that I care for any just now, thank you,” she said. Cassandra sat stiff and erect, tireless and silent, like a mileage marker beside a country lane. She was not interested in popcorn either.

The story concerned the seduction of a long-legged village girl by a mustachioed adventurer who afterward refuses to marry her on the grounds that she is impure. The girl, swollen with child, bursts in upon the nuptials of her seducer and the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and demands her due. She is turned out into the street. But late that night, as the newlyweds thrash about in the bridal bed—

It was at this point that Jane took hold of my arm and whispered that she wanted to leave. What could I do? I fumbled for her wrap, people hissed at us, great nude thighs slashed across the screen, and we headed for the glowing EXIT sign.

I proposed a club. “Oh do let’s walk!” Jane said. “The air is so frightfully delicious after that close, odious theatre — don’t you think?” Pigeons flapped and cooed. A panhandler leaned against the fender of a car and drooled into the gutter. I took Jane’s arm. Cassandra took mine.

At the Mooncalf we had our wrists stamped with luminescent ink and then found a table near the dance floor. The waitress’s fingernails were green daggers. She wore a butch haircut and three-inch heels. Jane wanted punch, Cassandra tea. I ordered three margaritas.

The band was re-creating the fall of the Third Reich amid clouds of green smoke and flashing lights. We gazed out at the dancers in their jumpsuits and platform shoes as they bumped bums, heads and genitals in time to the music. I thought of Catherine Morland at Bath and decided to ask Jane for a dance. I leaned across the table. “Want to dance?” I shouted.

“Beg your pardon?” Jane said, leaning over her margarita.

“Dance,” I shouted, miming the actions of holding her in my arms.

“No, I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid not.”

Cassandra tapped my arm. “I’d love to,” she giggled.

Jane removed her cap and fingered out her curls as Cassandra and I got up from the table. She grinned and waved as we receded into the crowd. Over the heads of the dancers I watched her sniff suspiciously at her drink and then sit back to ogle the crowd with her black satiric eyes.

Then I turned to Cassandra. She curtsied, grabbed me in a fox-trot sort of way and began to promenade round the floor. For so small a woman (her nose kept poking at the moribund Titanic listing across my lower rib cage), she had amazing energy. We pranced through the hustlers and bumpers like kiddies round a Maypole. I was even beginning to enjoy myself when I glanced over at our table and saw that a man in fierce black sideburns and mustache had joined Jane. He was dressed in a ruffled shirt, antique tie and coattails that hung to the floor as he sat. At that moment a fellow terpsichorean flung his partner into the air, caught her by wrist and ankle and twirled her like a toreador’s cape. When I looked up again Jane was sitting alone, her eyes fixed on mine through the welter of heads.

The band concluded with a crunching metallic shriek and Cassandra and I made our way back to the table. “Who was that?” I asked Jane.

“Who was who?”

“That mustachioed murderer’s apprentice you were sitting with.”

“Oh,” she said. “Him.”

I realized that Cassandra was still clutching my hand.

“Just an acquaintance.”

As we pulled in to the drive at Steventon, I observed a horse tethered to one of the palings. The horse lifted its tail, then dropped it. Jane seemed suddenly animated. She made a clucking sound and called to the horse by name. The horse flicked its ears. I asked her if she liked horses. “Hm?” she said, already looking off toward the silhouettes that played across the parlor curtains. “Oh yes, yes. Very much so,” she said, and then she released the seat belt, flung back the door and tripped up the stairs into the house. I killed the engine and stepped out into the dark drive. Crickets sawed their legs together in the bushes. Cassandra held out her hand.

Cassandra led me into the parlor, where I was startled to see the mustachioed ne’er-do-well from the Mooncalf. He held a teacup in his hand. His boots shone as if they’d been razor-stropped. He was talking quietly with Jane.

“Well, well,” said the Reverend, stepping out of the shadows. “Enjoy yourselves?”

“Oh, immensely, Father,” said Cassandra.

Jane was grinning at me again. “Mr. Boyle,” she said. “Have you met Mr. Crawford?” The brothers, with their fine bones and disproportionate heads, gathered round. Crawford’s sideburns reached nearly to the line of his jaw. His mustache was smooth and black. I held out my hand. He shifted the teacup and gave me a firm handshake. “Delighted,” he said.

We found seats (Crawford shoved in next to Jane on the love seat; I wound up on the settee between Cassandra and a brother in naval uniform), and the maid served tea and cakes. Something was wrong — of that I was sure. The brothers were not their usual witty selves, the Reverend floundered in the midst of a critique of Coleridge’s cult of artifice, Cassandra dropped a stitch. In the corner, Crawford was holding a whispered colloquy with Jane. Her cheeks, which tended toward the flaccid, were now positively bloated, and flushed with color. It was then that it came to me. “Crawford,” I said, getting to my feet. “Henry Crawford?”

He sprang up like a gunfighter summoned to the O.K. Corral. “That’s right,” he leered. His eyes were deep and cold as crevasses. He looked pretty formidable — until I realized that he couldn’t have been more than five-three or — four, give or take an inch for his heels.

Suddenly I had hold of his elbow. The Tiki medallion trembled at my throat. “I’d like a word with you outside,” I said. “In the garden.”

The brothers were on their feet. The Reverend spilled his tea. Crawford jerked his arm out of my grasp and stalked through the door that gave onto the garden. Nightsounds grated in my ears, the brothers murmured at my back, and Jane, as I pulled the door closed, grinned at me as if I’d just told the joke of the century.

Crawford was waiting for me in the ragged shadows of the trees, turned to face me like a bayed animal. I felt a surge of power. I wanted to call him a son of a bitch, but, in keeping with the times, I settled for “cad.” “You cad,” I said, shoving him back a step, “how dare you come sniffing around here after what you did to Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park? It’s people like you — corrupt, arbitrary, egocentric — that foment all the lust and heartbreak of the world and challenge the very possibility of happy endings.”

“Hah!” he said. Then he stepped forward and the moon fell across his face. His eyes were like the birth of evil. In his hand, a riding glove. He slapped my face with it. “Tomorrow morning, at dawn,” he hissed. “Beneath the bridge.”

“Okay, wiseguy,” I said, “okay,” but I could feel the Titanic sinking into my belt.

A moment later the night was filled with the clatter of hoofs.

I was greeted by silence in the parlor. They stared at me, sated, as I stepped through the door. Except for Cassandra, who mooned from behind her knitting, and Jane, who was bent over a notebook, scribbling away like a court reporter. The Reverend cleared his throat and Jane looked up. She scratched off another line or two and then rose to show me out. She led me through the parlor and down the hall to the front entrance. We paused at the door.

“I’ve had a memorable evening,” she said, and then glanced back to where Cassandra had appeared at the parlor door. “Do come again.” And then she held out her hands.

Her hands were cold.

(1977)

CAYE

Orlando’s uncle fathered thirty-two children. Fifteen by the first wife, five by the second, twelve by the third. Now he lives with a Canadian woman, postmenopausal. You can hear them after the generator shuts down. When the island is still and dark as a dreamless sleep, and the stone crabs crawl out of their holes.

The ground here is pocked with dark craters, burrows, veins in the earth. They are beginnings and endings. Some small as coins, others big enough to swallow a softball. The crabs creep down these orifices like the functions of the body.

Fran has a gas stove, a bed, some shelves, a battery-run tape player. She cooks. People who weren’t born here can sit on the edge of the bed and eat, sip rum with her. Then unwrinkle some bills. Fran cooks lobster, or conch, sometimes she cooks stone crab. She was not born here either, her bed is narrow, and the batteries in the tape player are getting weak.

Orlando sets and checks lobster traps. All the men on the island set and check lobster traps. The traps are made of wooden strips, shaped like Quonset huts, a conical entranceway at one end. Bait is unnecessary. The lobster, scouting the margins of the reef, the sea chanting over him, will prowl around this trap until he finds the conical entranceway. He will scrabble into the trap, delighted, secure from attack. The lobster psyche takes solace in holes. When the traps are hauled the law requires the fishermen to release any lobster whose tail is smaller than three inches, a seeding measure. The fishermen do not release lobsters whose tails are smaller than three inches — nor do they take them to market. Instead they twist off the heads, make a welter of the sweet curled tails, black against the frayed and blanched floorboards of their boats, carry the bloodless white meat home to their pots. Orlando tells me that the lobster catch is smaller this season than it was a year ago, and that a year ago it was smaller than the preceding season. I nod my head. Like the point of a cone I say.

There are no roads, sidewalks, automobiles, bicycles or shoes on the island.

Tito is a grandson of Orlando’s uncle. Orlando’s uncle does not know it. The island’s population is just over three hundred. It is not surprising that a good number of the island’s inhabitants should be related to Orlando’s uncle, considering his energy. Tito does not live in the village, but in a shack in the jungle on the far side of the island. He lives alone, his eyes blue, his mother (now dead) English. Tito roams the forest with his.22, putting holes in birds and lizards. Their carcasses fertilize the soil. When he is hungry he lifts a lobster trap, spears fish, dives for conch. Or splits coconut.

The sun here is mellow as an orange. One day it will flare up and turn the solar system to cinders. Then it will fall into itself, suck in the ribbons of flame like a pale ember, gather its last breath and explode, driving particles eternally through the universe, cosmic wind.

Fran is forty, paints her toenails, wears her hair in short curls. The muscles of her abdomen are lax. She dresses in saris, halters, things of the tropics. Fifteen years ago Fran came to the island and set up residence in a ten-by-twenty-foot shack. For the first six months she had money. Afterward she cooked. Now she drinks rum beneath the bulb in her shack, finds coins for the island’s children, cooks meals for visitors and occasionally for islanders. No man, tourist or islander, has been known to satisfy more than a single appetite in Fran’s shack. Though not from lack of trying.

Coconut palms grow here, without (scrutable) design. The coconuts, elaborate seeds, fall to the sand like blows in the stomach. Wet from the rain, they lie cradled in the sand until one day they split. Coconut palms grow from the split coconuts, without (scrutable) design.

Tito and Ida have been observed walking hand in hand along the path to the far end of the island, the uninhabited crescent of bird and bush. In Tito’s right hand, Ida’s fingers; in his left, the.22. Ida’s face is wide, Indian, her eyes black. Black as caverns.

Conch fritters hiss on the griddle in Fran’s shack. Four lots away Orlando’s uncle sits in his yard, conch shells piled high, the wedge-headed hammer and thin knife at his side, a wet conch in his lap. He presses the spiral shell to his knee and taps at it with the beak of his hammer. Twice, three times, and he’s tapped a thin rectangular hole just below the point of the spiral. The knife eases in, the conch out, the shell in his hand spewing up its secrets. Konk he calls it.

I am sitting on the edge of Fran’s bed, sipping rum, chewing lobster. There is another man in the shack, a West German. He speaks neither English nor Spanish. We eat in silence. Fran wears a halter, her belly slack, at the stove. When we finish our meal the man stands, pays, leaves. I pour another drink of rum. Fran’s back is turned. I lay my hand on her flank. She tells me to leave.

In 1962 Hurricane Hilda stirred up waves thirty-five feet tall and churned them across the Caribbean in the direction of the island. The sky was smoky, dark as iron, the wind bent the trees, hurtled coconut and leaf. Tito and Ida were children, Fran was in her prime, Orlando’s uncle had never heard of Canada and was yet to father four more children. The reef broke the biggest waves. All the traps were lost, the boats staved in, the shacks collapsed. Eight feet of salt water (home to lobster, conch, brine shrimp) washed over the island. Five drowned. The wind screamed blood and teeth.

The Canadian woman takes the biweekly boat to the mainland and Orlando’s uncle is alone. I see him in the yard, feeding chickens and turkeys. His face is like a mud pond dried in the sun. But his hair is rich and black, he walks straight as a hoe and his arms and chest are solid. He no longer checks traps. Instead he cleans conch. Soaks the white meat in lime, sprinkles it with pepper, and exercises his aging teeth. The protein does him good.

There is no law on the island. No JP, no police, no jail.

At night I lie in my hammock, listening to the rattle of the crabs as they emerge from their burrows (dark to dark) and prowl through the scrub. I watch the sky: fronds like scissors, stars like frost. There are meteors, planets, spaces between the stars, black holes. The black holes are not visible, but there nonetheless. Stars bigger than the sun, collapsed in on themselves, with a gravitational pull that sucks in light like water down a drain. Black holes, black as the moments before birth and after death.

Ida’s toes in the sand, sea wrack, the shells of conch, heads of lobster. She strolls past the boats, past the trembling docks with the outhouses perched over them, past the crude gate and the chickens and the turkeys, on up to the door of Orlando’s uncle’s house. Her mother is Orlando’s uncle’s granddaughter. She knows it, and Orlando’s uncle knows it. Neither cares.

Between the shore and the reef is a stretch of about half a mile. The water is twenty or thirty feet deep, there are nests of rock, plains of sweeping thick-bladed grass, rolling like wheat in a deep wind. Among the blades, conch. The handsome flame-orange and pink shells turned to the dark bottom, the spiral peaks indicating the sky. You dive, snatch at the peaks, turn them over — they are ghostly and gray, a hole, black hole, tapped in the roof. The vacant shells frighten off the living conch, Orlando tells me, like a graveyard after dark.

Still in the afternoon heat, dogs chickens children asleep, the generator like the hum of an organ, there are cries in the air, sudden as ice, cries of passion and rhythm, the pressure of groin and groin, cries that squeeze between the planks of Orlando’s uncle’s shack like air escaping a brown paper bag.

Tito’s shack is difficult to find in the dark. For one thing, the island is washed in night after the generator shuts down. For another, the path is narrow, not much used. If you step off the path you run the risk of snapping an ankle in the ruts dug by the stone crabs or of touching down on the carcass of a bird or lizard, sharp plumage, wet meat.

The Canadian woman was not hurt, but Orlando’s uncle is dead. She’d been back two days, it was dark, she stepped out to squat and urinate. I’d heard them celebrating her return: I swung in my hammock, thinking prurient thoughts, listening. I heard the door slam, I heard the five shots. The man who came out by boat from the mainland dug a bullet from the headboard of the bed. It was a small caliber, 22 he said. He asked the islanders if any of them owned a.22. And he asked me. We knew of no one who owned a.22, we told him, and he returned to the mainland the following day. Dark and sudden, these events have adumbrated change. Fran and the Canadian woman live together now. I visit them two times a day, eat, sip rum, pay. Orlando’s uncle’s shack stood empty for a few weeks. Then I moved in.

Deep in the shadows I spread a towel across the ground. It is too dark to see them, but I know the holes are there, beneath the cloth, the island pocked with them like a sickness. She stretches her back there, drops her shorts. Her knees fall apart. The breeze drifts in from the sea, bare night sky above. The sand fleas are asleep. I kneel, work myself into her, poke at her mouth with my tongue. Ida, I whisper, burrowing into her, dark blood beating, rooting, thrusting, digging, deep as I can go. I want to dig deeper.

(1975)

LITTLE FUR PEOPLE

They wanted to take her babies away. Wanted to seize them by court order and deny her access to them as if she were some welfare mother smoking crack in the ghetto, as if she couldn’t nurse and doctor them herself though she’d been doing it all these years and when had there ever been a complaint? Even the rumor of a complaint? She was furious, but she was scared too, scared in a way that tugged at her bowels and made the roots of her hair ache as if she’d been suspended by her ponytail in some hellish high-wire act. Even her babies couldn’t comfort her, not at first, not after the door slammed behind the officer and all the gloom of the uncaring world rushed in to fill the house with the dismal fog of defeat.

And the day had begun so promisingly — that’s what made it all the worse. After two days of overcast, Grace had woken to a kitchen suffused with a sun so ripe and mellow it was as if she were standing inside an orange and looking out, and she just knew that Rudolfo would take his medication without a fuss and that Birgitta’s temperature would have come down during the night. And she was right, she was right! Even Phil seemed better, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at breakfast and nodding his cunning little head in time to the music on the radio as she cleaned up the dishes. And then the UPS man came — and that was a blessing too, because the copy of Sciuridae in History she’d ordered from a mail-order house in Connecticut had finally arrived, and she was just sitting down to leaf through it, already fascinated by the pictures of mummified squirrels dug out of the ruins at Pompeii, when the bell rang again.

She opened the door on a nervous-looking young man with a pale cleanshaven expanse of upper lip and a puff of tawny beard clinging like plumage to the very tip of his chin. He was wearing a beige uniform with some sort of piping on the left shoulder and a circular patch over the breast pocket. His eyes — a dull, watery blue — stared out of his head in two different directions and his feet seemed to be working out the steps of some intricate dance routine on the doormat. “Mrs. Gargano?” he said, lifting his eyebrows and tightening the flesh round his mouth so that the flag of his beard seemed to stand at attention.

“Yes?” Grace said, with just the right blend of caution and hospitality — no matter how rude and venal the world might have become, she was always prepared to be gracious. The young man seemed to be looking beyond her at the knickknack shelf and her collection of ceramic figurines, though it was hard to say with those roving eyes. Suddenly she was overcome by a wave of pity — what must his mother have thought when she pressed him to her breast for the first time? — and she saw herself offering him a cup of tea and a slice of the banana nut bread she’d baked for her daughter, Jet.

“I’m Officer Kraybill,” he said, “of Fish and Game? We’ve had a complaint.”

It was then that she saw the curtains stir in the front window of the house across the street — Gladys Tranh’s house — and she had her first intimation of what was coming. “A complaint?”

“Yes,” the young man said, and his eyes had pulled into focus now, both of them locked on her face with a sudden intensity that made her wilt. “We understand you’re harboring wild animals on the premises.”

“Wild—?” For a moment, that was all she could manage to say, but she looked at him again, looked at him harder, and recovered herself. “Well, no. Not at all. There’s just my babies—”

“Babies?”

“My squirrels — my sick ones, the ones in need. People have been bringing them to me for years….”

Officer Kraybill’s jaw sagged and then composed itself again. His eyes were all over the place. He smiled — or tried to. “Mind if I have a look? I mean, if it’s not too much trouble, would you show them to me?”

Everything hung in the balance, but she didn’t know, didn’t suspect — she was too much an innocent, too trusting, too willing to judge a stranger by his poor homely walleyed face. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, but her tone was the tone of a woman who wants to be persuaded, “—I have a beauty parlor appointment at eleven….”

“It wouldn’t take a minute,” he said, coming right back at her. “I’d just like a look, to see what you’re doing — with the sick ones, I mean.”

And that was it, that was what got her: how could she resist anyone who spoke of her sick ones, her poor ailing babies? She opened the door wide and Officer Kraybill, with his misaligned eyes and insinuating beard, was in the house.

He lingered a moment over the ceramic squirrels—“Aren’t they precious?” she said. “They’re from Surrey, England, the ‘Squirrels of the World’ collection?”—and then she invited him into the living room. Misty and Bruno were there, stretched out on the sofa watching a “Lassie” rerun, a show that never failed to excite them. Whenever the collie barked out a message to his master, Bruno would stand up on his hind legs and chitter at the screen while Misty spun cartwheels across the rug. It was quite a sight, cute as pie, but as Grace stepped into the room with Officer Kraybill, both squirrels were lounging on their bellies contemplating a revolutionary new cheese slicer from Sweden. “That’s Misty,” Grace said, “the little Douglas’s? And the gray squirrel is Bruno. They’re inseparable. Like brother and sister.”

“Are they sick?” Officer Kraybill wanted to know.

“Sick?” she echoed, freezing him with a look of astonishment even as the image of the cheese slicer was replaced by that of a collie vaulting a white picket fence. “Why, they wouldn’t last ten minutes if I let them out the door.”

Still playing dumb, still stringing her along, Officer Kraybill lifted his eyebrows and let his wet eyes settle on her. “What’s wrong with them?”

Jet had warned her not to lecture people, but Grace couldn’t help herself, she just couldn’t — this was her life. “Misty’s been with me three years now — or almost three years; let’s see, it’ll be three in April. She was partially eviscerated by a Cadillac in Rancho Park and she’d gone into a coma before she was brought here — for the first week it was touch and go. Dr. Diaz got her patched up, but then we discovered she was diabetic — oh, yes, squirrels contract diabetes, just like people — and she requires two shots of insulin a day. Without it she’d go into shock and die.”

The officer had moved closer to the couch and he was peering down at Misty, his expression noncommittal.

“And Bruno,” she said, rushing on — and so what if Jet thought she put people off, that didn’t matter a whit, not where her babies were concerned—“Bruno’s been with me over six years now. He’s my favorite, except for Phil, of course, and I don’t mind admitting it.” She pinched her voice in a soft crooning falsetto: “Here, Bruno, come on, baby, come on.” Bruno twisted his neck to fasten his black glittering eyes on her and then, though you could see he was racked with pain, he hauled himself up the slope of the couch and made a feeble leap into her arms. “That’s right,” she crooned, bending to peck him a kiss.

Officer Kraybill cleared his throat.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to get carried away — it’s just that they’re so lovable, they are…. Well Bruno, Bruno suffers from arthritis and lumbago, and when he first came to me — here, you can see it here, along the base of his spine? — he’d lost the better part of his tail in an accident involving a Weber charcoal grill. And while that may not sound like much to you, you have to understand what something like that will do to a squirrel’s self-respect. I mean, his tail is everything — his blanket and pillow, his napkin, his new suit of clothes — and he flags every female in the forest with it. Bruno was devastated. Mr. Kraybill, you never saw such a depressed squirrel.”

But Officer Kraybill didn’t seem to be focusing on Bruno. He was scribbling something in a little leatherbound notebook. “And how many others do you have?” he asked, his voice flat and mechanical.

“You’re taking notes?” she said, and for the first time the gravity of the situation began to dawn on her.

“Just a formality,” he told her, but his wild eye betrayed him. “We’ve had a complaint. I’ve got to check it out. Now, how many do you have in all?”

“Thirty-two,” Grace said, tight-lipped. She cradled Bruno in her arms, afraid suddenly. “But why do you need to know? What sort of complaint was it?” She tried out a nervous laugh. “You don’t — I mean, I’m not doing anything wrong, am I?”

“And where do you keep them?” he said, ignoring the question. “Besides these two?”

Grace tried to compose herself. There’d been a complaint, that was all, nothing to get excited about. “I’ve got cages in the garage — but at any given time of the day, the squirrels have the run of the house. They’re litter-trained, you know, each and every one of them, even the pair that just came to me last week. Don’t think I keep them cooped up — I’d never do that. And I clean the cages daily, without fail—”

“I’d like to see the cages.” He was facing her, pen poised over the notebook, and he was no longer asking.

There was a silence. From the TV came the sound of a dog barking and Grace prayed that Misty and Bruno wouldn’t go into their routine — it just wouldn’t be appropriate right now, even she could see that. She thought for just a second of asking if he had a search warrant, like they do on the police shows, but that wouldn’t be courteous, and instead she heard herself saying, “Yes, of course.”

It was then that the door from the garage pushed open ever so slightly and Phil crawled in. There he was, tacked to the rug and looking up inquisitively at the visitor, not a trace of fear in him, while the sounds of the others — a contented mid-morning chatter — drifted through the doorway. And the smell. The smell too. Grace felt she had to offer an explanation. “Don’t mind that musty odor,” she said, “that’s natural. I could scrub the cages and change the wood shavings a hundred times a day and it’d still be there — think of it as their natural perfume. And this”—indicating the big yellow and chocolate Douglas’s squirrel at their feet—“this is Phil.”

“And he’s sick too, right?”

She gave the man a look. Was he trying to be rude? Her voice turned cold. “Phil was mauled by a pit bull. He required sixty-seven stitches to close his wounds and he will never have the use of his rear legs again. I’ll have you know, what with his various ailments, that I’ve taken him to Dr. Diaz over seventy times in the past two years.”

But Officer Kraybill wasn’t interested in Phil’s problems. He stepped over him and strode into the garage, where all the caged squirrels set up an expectant chittering. Molly went up and down the mesh of her cage like a monkey — she thought it was treat time — and Rudolfo sat up and clicked his teeth like a pair of castanets. In the time it took Grace to scoop Phil from the floor and step into the garage, a squirrel under each arm, Officer Kraybill had made up his mind. “You are in illegal possession of wildlife,” he announced, turning to her, “and unless these creatures are released back into the wild, we will have to confiscate them.”

Grace was stunned. “Confiscate? But they need me, can’t you see that? They’d die if I set them loose.”

“These squirrels — and all wildlife — are the property of the State of California, and it is against the law to keep, traffic in or domesticate them.”

Grace felt her heart stop, just like that, as if she was stretched out on the operating table, as if her pacemaker had gone dead in her chest. And then she caught her breath and her heart started up again and she was fierce with the sudden hammering of it. They weren’t going to take her babies away, no one was. Never. She came right back at him and she felt no obligation to be polite now that he’d shown his colors. “But I can kill them, though, can’t I? I can stalk them with a gun, innocent things that wouldn’t hurt a fly, isn’t that right?”

The eyes were back in their orbits. The beard stabbed at her. “If you have a valid hunting license, in season; there’s no bag limit on ground squirrels.”

“That’s crazy.”

He shrugged.

“But they’re people,” Grace said, and she could hear the break in her own voice, “little fur people.”

When the phone rang, Jet was coloring her hair. She was only twenty-eight, but she’d had gray in her hair since she was in her teens, and now she had to touch up her roots every other week if she didn’t want to look like the Bride of Frankenstein. It didn’t really bother her — haircolor was one of the grim necessities of life, like lipstick, eyeliner and makeup — but lately she’d begun to notice some gray down below — or white, actually, coiled white hairs of amazing length — and that really upset her. She’d spent nearly an hour the other night with the tweezers and a mirror, her legs propped up against the bathtub, the whole thing feeling vaguely obscene and not a little ridiculous, but she kept wondering what Vincent would think if he saw her turning white before his eyes. They’d only been dating a month, but he was two years younger than her and she’d told him she was twenty-five. Gray hairs. Little folds under her eyes. Some sort of scale on the back of her hands. And now she had the black paste all over her scalp, wondering if she should try it down there too — not this time, but maybe next — and the phone started ringing. She wriggled out of the plastic gloves and held the receiver gingerly to her wet ear.

Her mother’s voice was there suddenly, gasping out her name over the wire, and it was the gasp of a drowning woman, a woman asphyxiating on her own sobs. “My babies! They want to take my babies!”

When Jet got to the house, her hair still damp and black now with the sheer glistening chemical glow of the dye that would take two or three good shampooings to mellow into something that could pass for natural, she found the front door locked. “Ma,” she called, “you in there?” and she was about to go round back when a movement across the street caught her attention. It was her mother, dressed in an oversize green sweater that hid the flare of her hips, and she was rattling the wrought-iron gate out front of Mrs. Tranh’s house. This struck Jet as odd on a number of counts, not the least of which was that her mother and Mrs. Tranh had never been particularly friendly — or even neighborly, for that matter. But then nothing her mother did lately would have surprised Jet. People called Grace eccentric, but to Jet’s mind the term didn’t begin to describe the gulf of abstraction her mother seemed to be floundering in. That was what it meant to get old and have your husband die and your heart go bad. Eccentricity. It was like gray hairs.

Jet crossed the street, watching her mother’s shoulders as Grace fumbled with the latch, bewildered by the simple mechanism. Maybe it was one of the squirrels, Jet was thinking, maybe that was it. One of them escaped or something and she was canvassing the neighborhood. From the sound of her voice on the phone you would have thought they’d dropped a bomb on the house or something.

“Gladys!” Grace cried out suddenly in a high, oddly fluty voice, as if she were locked in an echo chamber. “Gladys Tranh! You open this gate!” A car that was badly in need of a muffler sputtered up the street. The starlings nesting in the twin palms out front of the Tranh house began to squabble and a few shot out from beneath the protection of the fronds as if they’d been expelled. “Gladys! I want to talk to you!”

Mrs. Tranh had cautiously cracked open her front door and extruded the nearly bald bulb of her head by the time Jet had reached her mother. Mrs. Tranh had a tight smile frozen on her face. She was so old she’d begun to look like a Chihuahua, and when was the last time Jet had seen her? “Go ‘way,” she said.

“Ma?” Jet reached out to touch her mother’s arm. “Ma, what’s wrong — is it the squirrels?”

Her mother turned to fix her with a tragic look and Jet felt something tighten inside her. “Jet,” was all her mother could say, and she forced out the single syllable of her only daughter’s name as if with her expiring breath. There were tears in her eyes. Her hands shook as they tried to make sense of the latch. But then she swung back round on Mrs. Tranh, who was gazing defiantly at her from across the expanse of the front walk, and lifted her voice: “You made that complaint, didn’t you? I know it was you. You just can’t stand to see anybody doing any good in this world, can you?”

“Ma,” Jet said, taking hold of her mother’s arm, but Grace shook her off.

“They want to take my babies!” she cried suddenly, and half a dozen starlings flew shrieking from the palms.

Mrs. Tranh’s eyes glittered, two fragments of volcanic glass buried in the worn hide of her face. “They stink, your baby,” Mrs. Tranh said in a gritty, dried-out voice. “Dirty animal.”

Jet had begun to feel conspicuous. At least two cars had passed and slowed as if this were some sort of spectacle, a sideshow, and a woman three doors down — was that Mrs. Mahon? — had stepped out onto her porch. Jet’s scalp tingled under the lingering assault of the chemical, and she looked away for a moment, distracted. That was when her mother threw one sneaker-clad foot atop the spikes of the wrought-iron fence and attempted to boost herself over, muttering under her breath. “Ma,” Jet snapped, and she couldn’t help herself, everyone was looking, “have you gone crazy or what? Come down off there, come on,” and she was tugging at her mother’s sweater and fighting the rigid pole of her mother’s leg when Violet Tranh appeared in the doorway behind her own mother. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. And then: “Jet? Mrs. Gargano?”

At this point, Jet had succeeded in extricating her mother’s foot from the spikes of the railing, but perversely Grace had seized two of the palings and refused to let go. “Damn it, Ma, what’s wrong?” Jet hissed as Violet Tranh came down the walk and stationed herself on the far side of the gate, an expression that might be interpreted as satiric pressed into the smooth flesh at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Violet was the youngest of the Tranhs and she and Jet had gone to high school together. Jet was thinking about that as the faces seemed to multiply up and down the block and the cars slowed and Violet smirked. They’d both had a crush on the same guy once — Derek Kubota — and Violet was the one he’d finally asked out.

“What’s the problem?” Violet said.

“It’s nothing,” Jet assured her. “My mom’s just a little upset, is all.” Jet wanted to sink right on down through the sidewalk and become one with the grubs, beetles and worms.

“I’m not upset,” Grace insisted, turning a furious face on her. “It’s your mother,” she said, coming back to Violet. “She”—and here her voice broke again—“she put in a complaint about my, my babies.”

Mrs. Tranh spoke up then, her voice leaping and pitching through a morass of Vietnamese that sounded like the recipe for a six-course meal. Violet looked straight into Jet’s eyes as she translated. “My mother says this is a residential neighborhood, zoned for houses, not animals.”

“Animals?” Jet echoed, and though she knew the whole thing was ridiculous, she could feel the anger rising in her. “We’re talking squirrels here, aren’t we? Are we on the same page or what? Look up in the trees, why don’t you? — the squirrels were here before we were.”

Violet never took her eyes off her. It was like a staring contest, a stripping away of the flesh to probe at the vitals beneath. “Yeah,” she said, and her voice had a real edge to it, “and so were the dinosaurs.”

Grace knew what was coming. She knew the Officer Kraybills of the world didn’t care a fig about mercy or tenderness or what was right and good — no, all they cared about was the law, the stupid law that allowed you to blast your fellow creatures out of the trees but made you into a criminal if you dared to try and ease their suffering. And they would be back, she was sure of that.

All that week she was up before dawn, up and dressed, brooding over her coffee while her babies played at her feet. She’d released Florio (as if that would satisfy them) because he didn’t need her care anymore — Dr. Diaz had removed the splint and pronounced him fit. The only thing was, Florio refused to go. Every time she looked up, there he was, staring in at the window, and it didn’t matter what part of the house she went to — living room, basement, kitchen, bedroom — there he was, cluttering at the glass. Finally, last night, when the temperature dipped down into the thirties, she’d broken down and let him back in. He was under the table now, wrestling with Rudolfo. They’d become best friends, nothing short of that, and how could she justify separating them?

Still, she was no fool, and she knew they’d be back — Officer Kraybill and probably some other officious puff-bearded servant of the law — to badger and bully her into giving up her babies. They’d have a subpoena or search warrant or something and they’d tramp through her house like the Gestapo, hauling away her sick ones even as she barred the door with her body. The image appealed to her — barring the door with her body — and she was holding it there in the steam that rose from her second cup of coffee when the doorbell rang and all her worst fears were realized.

It was Officer Kraybill — she recognized him through the receding lens of the peephole in the front door — and he had two others with him, a man and a woman dressed in uniforms identical to his. Three of them, and she couldn’t help thinking that was the way it always was in the movies and on TV when they had to evict widows or tear children from their mothers’ breasts, safety in numbers, don’t get your hands dirty. But oh, boy, her heart was going. She crouched there behind the door and she didn’t know what to do. The bell rang again and then again. She heard them conferring in a blur of voices and then a shadow flitted past the curtains in the living room and she heard the doorknob rattle in the kitchen. She was one step ahead of them: it was locked, locked and bolted.

“Mrs. Gargano? Are you in there?”

It was his voice, Officer Kraybill’s, and she could picture his fish eyes going crazy in his head. She held her breath, crouched lower. And that might have been the end of it, at least for then, but just at that moment Misty came shooting across the rug with Florio on her heels and the two of them made a leap for the clothestree and the clothestree slammed into the wall with a thump you could have heard all the way to Sherman Oaks and back.

“Mrs. Gargano? I can hear you in there. Now will you open up or do I have to use force? It’s in our power, you know — you are harboring wild animals in there and as agents of the Fish and Game Department we have the right of search and seizure. Do you hear me? Mrs. Gargano?”

She had to speak up then, because she was afraid and because the germ of an idea had begun to take hold in her brain. “I’m, I’m not feeling well,” she called, trying to distort her clear natural soprano into something feeble and stricken.

There was a moment’s silence. The rumble of voices: more conferring. Then a new voice, a woman’s: “This is Officer Soto, Mrs. Gargano. We’re very sorry to hear that you’re ill, but you stand in violation of the law and this is no small matter. If you refuse to cooperate we’ll have no recourse but to obtain a warrant, do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she bleated, putting everything she had into the subterfuge of her voice. “I don’t want any trouble — I just want the best for my … my babies. But I’m not dressed yet, I’m not, really. If you come back later I’ll let you in—”

Officer Kraybill: “Promise?”

She’d never let them in. She’d die first. Set the house afire and take her babies with her. “Yes,” she called. “I promise.”

Another silence. Then the voices, consulting. “All right,” Officer Soto said finally, “you’ve got twenty-four hours. We’ll be back here tomorrow morning at eight A.M. sharp, and there’ll be no more of this business, do you hear? We’ll have a warrant with us.”

Grace watched them leave through a crack in the curtains. There was a cockiness to their gait that irritated her — even the woman walked like a football player. She watched them climb into the cab of a truck big enough to take away all her babies at once and haul them off to some Fish and Game compound, some concentration camp somewhere. It made her heart pound even to think about it.

But she wasn’t finished yet, not by a long shot. This wasn’t Nazi Germany, this was America, and if they thought they were going to just walk in and trample all over her rights, they had another think coming. Before they’d turned the corner, Grace had Jet on the phone.

Jet didn’t know the first thing about U-Haul trucks and she was afraid to drive anything that big anyway, so she called up Vincent at work — he was bartending till closing — and asked him if he’d meet her at her place when he got off. She’d managed to get the thing as far as her apartment, but that was only six blocks from the. rental office, in light traffic and with no turns or stoplights — getting it all the way over to her mother’s was something else altogether. Vincent didn’t sound too happy about the whole proposition — she wasn’t exactly overjoyed herself — but there it was.

It was past eleven when he came up the walk to her apartment — business had been slow and he’d closed up early — and she was out the door in a hooded sweatshirt before he could ring the bell. She fell into his arms and groped at him a bit while they kissed, and then she held up the keys to the truck. Vincent was tall and bone-thin, with a high-stacked pompadour and long sideburns and a fading green tattoo on the left side of his neck. The tattoo was homemade and it was so old and shapeless you couldn’t really tell what it was — Vincent said he’d done it with a couple of friends one night when he was fifteen or sixteen, he couldn’t remember exactly. “And what’s it supposed to be?” she’d asked him when they first met. He’d shrugged. “It didn’t really come out,” he said. “Yeah,” she said. “And so?” He shrugged again. “It’s supposed to be Donatello — you know, the Ninja Turtles?”

Tonight, he just climbed into the truck, shaking his head. “Nobody would believe me if I told them what we were doing here,” he said, “—I mean, safehouses for squirrels? Or maybe we should call them safeholes or something.” The truck started up then with a rumbling clatter, as if there were nothing under the hood but iron filings and cheap aluminum fans. Vincent jerked at the gearshift, and the lights of a passing car isolated his look of bemusement, a look Jet found irresistible. They kissed again, a long lingering kiss, and she assured him he’d have his reward — later.

Grace blinked the porchlight twice when they pulled up in front of the house, then all the lights went out. A moment later she joined them in the driveway, a tiny figure dressed all in black. “Shh,” she warned as they stepped down from the truck, “they could be watching — you never know.”

Vincent hunched his shoulders in his leather jacket and lit a cigarette. Jet had brought him to the house to meet her mother two weeks ago, and after making him what she called a highball with some of the V.S.O.P. bourbon she’d inherited from Jet’s father, Grace had taken him out to the garage and introduced him to each and every one of her thirty-odd squirrels — and of course there was a story behind each of them, a long and detailed story. Vincent had taken it pretty well — at least nothing showed on his face as far as Jet could see — but now he said, “Who? Who’d be watching at this hour?”

“Shhhh!” Grace clamped a hand round Vincent’s arm and pressed a finger to her lips. “You don’t want to know,” she whispered, and then they were following her into the garage, where the squirrels greeted them with a vigorous whirring of their exercise wheels and the usual rising odor of dank fermentation that Jet could only liken to the smell of the shower room in high school.

They worked by the ghostly glimmer of two nightlights, all the illumination her mother would risk, and as Jet and Vincent hauled the big awkward wire cages out the door and stacked them in the back of the truck, Grace hovered at their elbows, urging them to be extra careful with this one and to set that one down easy and not to disturb Molly or Lucretius or whoever. The last three cages contained her favorites, the squirrels that seemed to mean more to her than Jet or her father or anyone ever had — Phil, Misty and Bruno. These were the ones she gave the run of the house to and they were destined for Jet’s apartment, an arrangement that Jet had decidedly mixed feelings about, even though her mother assured her that it would only be for a week or so and that she’d be there every day to look after them herself. “Careful! Careful!” Grace cried as they bob-bled the last cage, their fingers numb with the cold and the impress of the wire. “Oh, Philly, you poor baby, mamakins is going to look after you, yes she is—”

When they’d loaded him in and shut the door, Grace broke down. “Ma,” Jet pleaded, but her mother began to sob and she had to wrap her arms round her and rock her back and forth while Vincent lit an impatient cigarette and fiddled with the collar of his jacket.

“Did you know that Phil is nearly twelve years old, Vincent — did you know that?” Grace said, struggling for control. She was rocking in Jet’s arms, the light of the streetlamp making a glistening doughy ball of her face. “That’s what Dr. Diaz estimates, anyway — and that’s ancient for a squirrel, almost like Methuselah, though they can live to be fifteen, so they say—” And then she did the unforgivable, her mind gone loose with age and anxiety or whatever, but she somehow made the connection between the squirrel’s birthday and Jet’s and before Jet could stop her she said, “But haven’t you got a birthday coming up?”

“We’ve got to be going, Ma,” Jet said. “We’ve got to deliver your, your”—she couldn’t bring herself to use the term “babies,” not in front of Vincent—“these squirrels to six different addresses, one of them all the way out in Simi Valley.”

But her mother wouldn’t quit. “You do have a birthday coming up, don’t you? December fifth. God,” she went on, “I can hardly believe you’re going to be twenty-nine — or is it thirty?”

“Ma—” Jet said.

Vincent said nothing, but Jet could feel him looking at her.

The sound of a car engine half a block away inserted itself into the silence. Overhead, a jet scrawled its graffiti in the sky. Grace sighed. “We’re none of us getting any younger, I guess.”

Vincent climbed back into the truck and Jet gave her mother a hug and told her not to worry, they’d take care of everything. And that would have been that, but for the fact that when Vincent swung wide out of the driveway he let the wheel slip out of his hands for an instant and the right front bumper of the truck cut a long screeching furrow into the side of Mrs. Tranh’s brand-new white Honda Accord, which was pulled up at the curb in front of her house. Instantly, the porchlight at the Tranhs’ went on and Mrs. Tranh and Violet stood there at the door, their necks craning into the light. It was amazing. You would have thought they’d been sleeping on the doormat or something. But that was nothing compared to Grace’s reaction. She let out with a long withering cry of despair that would have waked the dead, and the squirrels, jostled in their cages, responded with such a cacophony of yips, squeals and screeches you would have thought they’d been set afire — and in that moment Jet couldn’t help wishing they had.

The truck was stalled in the middle of the street, emergency lights flashing, the incontrovertible evidence of Vincent’s miscalculation planted in the side of the Accord. Jet’s mother emitted a series of short piping screeches as she skittered across the road and began to claw at the rear door of the truck, which only provoked the squirrels all the more. By this time Vincent was standing on the pavement in the glare of the headlights, scratching his head and puzzling over the rent Accord as if it had dropped down from outer space, and the Tranhs, mother and daughter, were right there too, their voices clamoring in excitement and outrage. Jet climbed down out of the truck and attempted to calm her mother. “Ma,” she said, “Ma, the squirrels are all right, it’s nothing, just a fender bender, that’s all—”

Unfortunately, Mrs. Tranh overheard this last and cried, “Fender bender, that all, huh? Nothing to you, huh? Huh?” She was dressed in a faded pink housecoat and her voice was high and unholy in the night. “I pay good money!” she screeched. And there was Violet, in shorts and bare feet, with a black leather jacket hastily thrown over a little black top, trying to calm her mother too. A long moment ticked by, the timpanic thump of the squirrels throwing themselves against the mesh of their cages punctuating Grace’s sobs, Vincent’s protestations of innocence and Mrs. Tranh’s angry outbursts, and then Violet leveled a look on Jet and said, “We’ll need to see your insurance and we’re going to have to call the police.”

That was all Grace needed to hear. “No, no police!” she sobbed.

Mrs. Tranh perked up suddenly. “Your squirrel baby,” she said, “that’s what this is about, yes?” The flashing lights played off her face, shot sparks from her eyes. “In Bien-hoa we eat squirrel. Monkey too.” She was looking at Jet now, her mouth twisted tight with the effort of the words. “Tell your mother save people, not squirrel.”

Grace said something then that Jet would never believe had come from the lips of her mother, and she had to hold her back, the older woman’s arms straining against her as when their roles were reversed and Jet was the child. That was when her mother turned on her with a hiss: “One simple thing I ask from you, one simple thing, and look what happens—”

It was a mess, a real mess. Mrs. Tranh wouldn’t let Vincent pull the truck away from the car until the police came and wrote up their report, and though there wasn’t much traffic, Jet had to stand out in the middle of the street, shivering in her hooded sweatshirt, and wave the cars by with a flashlight. Her mother wanted to unload the squirrels and hide them back in the garage before the police came, but Jet talked her out of it, and finally Grace staggered across the street like a woman twice her age and hid herself in the darkened house.

After a while it began to rain, a soft breathing mist of a rain that took the curl out of Jet’s hair but didn’t seem to discourage the Tranhs, who sat grimly at the curb waiting for the law to arrive. It must have been nearly half past one when the police finally showed up, two gray-haired men in their forties, one Mexican, one white. They were half-asleep, rolling out of the car like the jelly doughnuts that sustained them, until Mrs. Tranh woke them up. “All right,” the white cop said in the chop of the lights and the swirl of mist that hung round him like a curtain, “who was driving here?”

The Tranhs looked to Jet and Jet looked to Vincent. It seemed to her he had a pleading sort of look in his eyes, the sort of look that was meant to convey a complex message about love and commitment, about guilt and responsibility and maybe even lapsed insurance payments. “He was,” she said finally, and she couldn’t help lifting her finger to point him out.

Grace never drank, not more than once or twice a year anyway, but as she sat in the darkened house and watched the lights clench and unclench the belly of the curtains while the Tranhs and her daughter and Vincent and half a dozen or so of the curious or bored moved back and forth in silhouette across the scene of the accident, she groped in the liquor cabinet for one of Bill’s bottles of liquor — any one — screwed off the cap and took a swallow. It was like drinking acid. Instantly her stomach was on fire and she wanted to spit the stuff back into the bottle, but it was too late. After a minute, though, she took another sip, and then another, and before long her heart stopped hammering at her rib cage. She had to be careful. She did. She could have another episode and that was the last thing she wanted — that wouldn’t do her babies any good, no, no good at all.

She peeked through the curtains, waiting now, waiting for the police to ask what was in the truck, as if they couldn’t hear — and smell — for themselves. And if they didn’t ask, Gladys Tranh would tell them, you could count on that. “Squirrels?” the policeman would say, and then: “Do you have a permit for these animals?” And if that happened it was just a matter of time before Officer Kray-bill showed up to have the last laugh. But maybe she should go out there, maybe she could distract them — or maybe, if she pleaded and begged and threatened to kill herself, they’d at least let her have Phil; Phil, that’s all she wanted—

But nothing happened. The rain fell. The odd car drove round the truck. Gladys Tranh went back into the house and one of the policemen wrote out his report while Jet, Vincent and Violet looked on. Then the police were gone and the Tranh house was dark and Jet was knocking at the door. “Ma? Are you in there?” Jet called. “Listen, Ma, is it okay if we call it off for tonight? Vincent’s tired. Ma? He says he doesn’t want to do it.”

Grace just stood there, the door between her and her daughter, the pacemaker keeping its rock-steady beat in her chest, and she didn’t say a word.

(1994)

JOHN BARLEYCORN LIVES

I was just lifting the glass to my lips when she stormed through the swinging doors and slapped the drink out of my hand. “Step back,” she roared, “or suffer hellfire and eternal damnation,” and then she pulled a hatchet out from under her skirts and started to splinter up Doge’s new cherrywood bar. I ducked out of the way, ten-cent whiskey darkening the crotch of my pants, and watched her light into the glassware. It was like a typhoon in a distillery — nuggets of glass raining down like hail, the sweet bouquet of that Scots whisky and rum and rye going up in a mist till it teared your eyes. Then Doge came charging out of the back room like a fresh-gelded bull, rage and bewilderment tugging at the corners of his mustache, just in time to watch her annihilate the big four-by-six mirror in the teakwood frame he’d had shipped up from New Orleans. BOOM! it went, shards of light washing out over the floor. Doge grabbed her arm as she raised the hatchet to put another cleft in the portrait of Vivian DeLorbe, but the madwoman swung round and caught him with a left hook. Down he went — and Vivian DeLorbe followed him.

The only other soul in the barroom was Cal Hoon, the artist. He was passed out at one of the tables, a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass at his elbow. I was up against the back wall, ready to snatch up a chair and defend myself if necessary. The wild woman strode over to Cal’s table and shattered the bottle with a hammering blow that jarred the derby from his head and left the hatchet quivering in the tabletop. And then the place was still. Cal raised his head from the table, slow as an old tortoise. His eyes were like smashed tomatoes and something dangled from the corner of his mouth. The madwoman stared down at him, hands on her hips. “Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes?” she demanded. Cal goggled up at her, stupefied. She pointed a finger at his nose and concluded: “He who tarries long at the wine.” She must have been six feet tall. “Down on your knees!” she snarled, “and pray forgiveness of the Lord.” Suddenly she kicked the chair out from under him and he toppled to the floor. A few taps from the toe of her boot persuaded him to clamber to his knees. Then she turned to me. I was Editor in Chief of The Topeka Sun, a freethinker, one of the intellectual lights of the town. But my knees cracked all the same as I went down and clasped my hands together. We sang “Art thou weary, art thou languid?” Cal’s voice like a saw grinding through knotty pine, and then she was gone.

Two days later I was sitting at a table in the Copper Dollar Saloon over on Warsaw Street waiting for a steak and some fried eggs. John McGurk, my typesetter, was with me. It couldn’t have been more than nine-thirty in the morning. We’d been up all night getting out a special edition on McKinley’s chances for a second term and we were drooping like thirsty violets. McGurk no sooner called for whiskey and soda water than there she was, the madwoman, shoulders like a lumberjack’s, black soutane from her chin to the floor. A file of women in black bonnets and skirts whispered in behind her. “Look here!” guffawed one of the bad characters at the bar. “It’s recess time at the con-vent.” His cronies cackled like jays. McGurk laughed out loud. I grinned, watchful and wary.

Her left eye was swollen closed, maroon and black; the other leered and goggled in a frightening, deranged way. She fixed the bad character with a look that would freeze a bowl of chili, and then she raised her arm and the women burst into song, their voices pitched high and fanatical, the rush of adrenaline and moral fervor swelling their bosoms and raking the rafters:

Praise ye the Lord.

Praise ye the Lord from the heavens:

Praise ye Him in the heights.

Praise ye Him, all ye angels:

Praise ye Him, all His hosts.

Praise ye Him, sun and moon.

Praise ye Him, all ye stars of light.

We were defeated, instantly and utterly. The bad character hung his head, the barkeep wrung his bar rag, two of the cronies actually joined in the singing. McGurk cursed under his breath while I fought the impulse to harmonize, a childhood of choir rehearsals and gleaming organ pipes welling up in my eyes. Then she brandished the hatchet, waving it high over her head like a Blackfoot brave, the other women following suit, drawing their weapons from the folds of their gowns. They laid waste to the barroom, splinter by splinter, howling hosannas all the while, and no one lifted a finger to stop them.

I watched my beer foam out over the pitted counter, and somewhere, from the depths of the building, I recognized the odor of beefsteak burned to the bottom of an iron fry pan.

We decided to strike back. The ruins of the Copper Dollar Saloon lay strewn about us: splinters and sawdust, the scalloped curls of broken glass, puddles of froth. I reached across the table and grabbed hold of McGurk’s wrist. “We’ll do an expose, front page,” I said, “and back it up with an editorial on civil liberties.” McGurk grinned like a weasel in a chicken coop. I told him to get on the wire and dig up something on Mrs. Mad that would take some of the teeth out of her bite. Then I trundled off home to get some sleep.

An hour later he was knocking at my door. I threw on a robe and opened up, and he burst into the parlor, his eyes shrunk back and feverish. I offered him a chair and a brandy. He waved them away. “Name’s Carry Gloyd Nation,” he said. “Born in ‘46 in Kentucky. Married Charles Gloyd, M.D., in ‘67—and get this — she left him after two months because he was a rummy. She married Nation ten years later and he divorced her just a few months back on the grounds of desertion.”

“Desertion?”

“Yep. She’s been running around tearing up saloons and tobacco shops and Elks and Moose lodges all over the Midwest. Arrested in Fort Dodge for setting fire to a tobacco shop, in Lawrence for tearing the dress off a woman in the street because she was wearing a corset. Spent three days in jail in St. Louis for assaulting the owner of a Chinese restaurant. She claims Chinese food is immoral.”

I held up my palm. “All right. Fine. Go home and get some sleep and then work this thing up for tomorrow’s paper. Especially the arrest record. We’ll take some of the edge off that hatchet, all right.”

We ran the story next day. Two-inch headlines, front page. On the inside, just under a thought-provoking piece on the virtues of the motorcar as the waste-free vehicle of the future, I ran a crisp editorial on First and Fourth Amendment guarantees and the tyranny of the majority. It was a mistake.

By 8 A.M. there were two hundred women outside the office singing “We Shall Overcome” and chaining themselves to the railing. Banners waved over the throng, DEMON ALCOHOL and JOHN BARLEYCORN MUST DIE, and one grim woman held up a caricature of me with a bottle in my hand and the sun sinking into its neck. The legend beneath it read: THE TOPEKA SUN SETS.

None of my employees showed up for work — even McGurk deserted me. At eight-fifteen his son Jimmy slipped into the front office. He’d come to tell me his father was sick. Well so was I. I bolted the door after him and dodged into the back room to consult a bottle of Kentucky bourbon I kept on hand for emergencies. I took a long swallow while snatches of song, speechifying, cheers and shouts sifted in from the street. Then there was a crash in the front office. I peered through the doorway and saw that the window had been shattered — on the floor beneath it lay the gleaming blade, tough oaken handle of a hatchet.

Someone was pounding on the front door. I crept to the window and peeped out. The crows now filled the street. Reverend Thorpe was there, a group of Mennonites in beards and black, another hundred women. I thought I saw McGurk’s wife Lucy in the press, obscured by the slow helix of smoke that rose from a heap of still-folded newspapers. I wondered where the Sheriff was.

The door had now begun to heave on its hinges with each successive blow. It was at this point that I altered my line of perspective and saw that it was Mrs. Mad herself at the door, hammering away with the mallet head of her hatchet. “Open up!” she bellowed. “I demand a retraction of those Satan-serving lies! Open up — I say!” On hands and knees, like an Indian fighter or a scout for Teddy Roosevelt, I made my way to the back room, took another pull at the bung and then ducked out the loading entrance. I tugged the hat down over my brow and headed for Doge’s Place to regroup.

Doge had replaced the swinging doors with a three-inch-thick oak slab, which was kept bolted at all times. I tapped at the door and a metal flap opened at eye level. “It’s me, Doge,” I said, and the bolt shot back. Inside, two workmen were busy with hammer and saw, and Cal sat at a table with canvas, palette and a bottle of whisky, shakily reproducing the portrait of Vivian DeLorbe from the defaced original. Beside him, hanging his head like a skunked coonhound, was McGurk.

I stepped up to the improvised bar (a pair of sawhorses and a splintery plank) and threw down two quick whiskeys. Then I sauntered over to join Cal and McGurk. McGurk muttered an apology for leaving me to face the music alone. “Forget it, John,” I said.

“They got Lucy, you know,” he said.

“I know.”

Doge pulled up a chair and for a long moment we sat there silent, watching Cal trace the quivering perimeter of Vivian DeLorbe’s bust. Then Doge asked me if I was going to retract the story. I told him hell would freeze over first. McGurk pointed out that we’d be out of business in a week if I didn’t. Doge cursed Mrs. Mad. McGurk cursed Temperance. We had a drink on it.

Cal laid down his brush and gave me a watery-eyed stare. “Know how you git yerself rid of ‘er?”

“I’d give a hundred silver dollars to know that, friend,” Doge said.

“Simple,” Cal croaked, choking off to clear his throat and expectorate on the floor. “Git hold on that first husband of hers — Doc Gloyd. Sight of him and she’ll scare out of town like a horse with his ass-hairs afire.”

The three of us came alive, hope springing eternal, et cetera, and we pressed him for details. Did he know Gloyd? Could he find him? Would Gloyd consent to it? Cal lifted the derby to smooth back his hair and then launched a windy narrative that jumped around like a palsied frog. Seems he’d been on a three-week drunk with “the Doc” in St. Louis’s skid row six months earlier. The Doc had come into some money — a twenty-dollar gold piece — and the two of them had lain out in a field behind a distillery until they’d gone through it. “Fresh-corked bottles of the smoothest, fifty cent,” said Cal, his eyes gone the color of butter. When he’d asked Gloyd about the twenty, Gloyd told him it was a token of gratitude from the thirsty citizens of Manhattan, Kansas. They’d paid his train-fare and soaked him full of hooch to come out and rid the town of a plague.

“Mrs. Mad?” I said.

“You guessed it,” said Cal, a rasping snicker working its way up his throat. “All she got to do is see him. It’s liken to holdin a cross up front of a vampire.”

Two hours later Cal and I were leaning back in the club car of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, trying out their sipping whiskey, savoring a cigar, heading east. For St. Louis.

We were feeling pretty ripe by the time we stepped down at the St. Louis station. I was a bit disoriented, what with the railway yard alone half the size of Topeka proper, and what with the rush of men in derby hats and short coats and women with their backsides hefted up all out of proportion. Cal, on the other hand, was right at home. He stooped to pluck up a cigar butt and then swaggered through the crowd to where a man, all tatters and ribs, sat propped against a bench like a discarded parasol. The man sat on the pavement, his elbows splayed on the bench behind him, head hanging as if his neck had been broken. Cal plunked down beside him like a wornout drayhorse, oblivious to the suspicious-looking puddle the fellow was sitting in. The man’s eyelids drooped open as Cal produced a bottle and handed it to him. The man drank, held the bottle up for Cal. Cal drank, handed it back. They conferred, sniggering, for five or ten minutes, then Cal rose with a crack of knee and beckoned to me. “He’s in town, all right, the salty dog. Redfearns here seen him yestiddy.” I glanced down at Redfearns. He looked as if he hadn’t seen anything in a long while. “Is he sure?”

“Down by the docks,” Cal croaked, already whistling for a hackney cab.

We left our things — my things, Cal had nothing but the hat on his head and a pair of suspenders — at Potter’s Saloon, Beds Five Cents, corner of Wharf St. and Albermarle Ave. Potter sold us two bottles of local whiskey for research purposes and we strolled out. to explore the underworld of the docks and environs. Each time we passed a supine figure in the street Cal stopped to make an identity check, and if expedient, to revive it with a slug or two of Potter’s poison. Then followed a period of bottle passing and sniggering colloquy that twinned the Redfearns encounter as if they’d rehearsed it.

After a while I found myself heaving down beside Cal and these reeking winesoaks, the sun building a campfire under my hat, trousers soiled. taking my turn when the bottle was passed. There I sat, Editor in Chief of The Topeka Sun, a freethinker and one of the intellectual lights of the town, on the blackened cobblestones of St. Louis’s most disreputable streets, my judgment and balance eroded, vision going, while lazy bluebottles floated between the sweat-beaded tip of my nose and the mounds of horseshit that lay round us like a series of primitive sculptures. All in the cause of humanity.

As the day wore on I began to lose touch with my surroundings. I rose when Cal touched my arm, collapsed like a rump-shot dog when he stopped to interrogate another souse. We walked, talked and drank endlessly. I remember a warehouse full of straw boaters and whalebone corsets, a bowl of chili and a cup of black coffee in a walk-up kitchen, a succession of filthy quays, garbage bins, toothless faces and runny eyes. But no Gloyd. When the sun finally lurched into the hills, Cal took me by the elbow and steered us back to Potter’s.

I was discouraged, disheartened, and thanks to Potter’s home brew, nearly disemboweled. After puking against the side of a carriage and down the front of my shirt, there was only one thing I wanted from life: a bed. Potter (the only thing I remember about him is that he had the most flaccid, pendulous jowls I’d ever seen on man or beast — they looked like nothing so much as buttocks grafted onto his face) led me up the stairs to the dormitory and gave me a gentle shove into the darkened room. “Number Nine,” he said. When my eyes became accustomed to the light I saw that the ranks of wooden bedsteads were painted with white numbers. I started down the row, reeling and reeking, fighting for balance, until I drew up to Number Nine. As I clutched at the bedpost with my left hand and fought to unbutton my shirt with my right, I became aware of a form beneath the horsehair blanket spread across my bunk. Someone was in my bed. This was too much. I began to shake him. “Hey, wake up there, pardner. That’s my bunk you got there. Hey.” It was then that I lost my footing and tumbled atop him.

He came alive like a whorehouse fire, screeching and writhing. “Buggery!” he shrieked. “Murder and sodomy!” The other occupants of the dormitory, jolted awake, began spitting threats and epithets into the darkness. I tried to extract myself but the madman had my head in a vise-grip. His voice was high-pitched and spasmodic, a sow scenting the butcher’s block. “Pederasty!” he bawled.

Suddenly the room blazed with light. It was Potter, wagging his inhuman jowls, a lantern in his hand. Cal stood at his elbow, squinting into the glare. I turned my head. The man who had hold of me was hoary as a goat, yellow-toothed, his eyes like the eggs of some aquatic insect. “Doc!” shouted Cal.

The madman loosened his grip. “Cal?” he said.

McGurk met us at the Topeka station and gave us the lay of the land. A group of them — women in black bonnets, teetotalers and Holy Rollers — were still picketing the office, and in the absence of The Sun had begun an alternative press in the basement of the Baptist church. McGurk showed me a broadside they’d printed. It described me as “a crapulous anarchist,” “a human viper,” and “a lackey of the immoral and illicit business enterprises which prey on the emotionally feeble for the purpose of fiduciary gain.” But a syntactical lashing wasn’t the worst of it. Mrs. Mad had bought off the Sheriff and she and her vigilantes were scouring the town in the name of Jesus Christ, sobriety and abstinence from tobacco, fraternity and Texicano food. She’d evacuated the Moose Lodge and Charlie Trumbull’s Tobacco Emporium, and then her disciples had boarded up the doors. And she’d closed down Pedro Paramo’s eatery because he served fresh-pounded tortillas and refried beans with an order of eggs. It was high time for a showdown.

We threw open the massive oaken door at Doge’s Place, took the boards down from the new plate-glass windows, lit the oil lamps, and hired a one-legged banjo strummer from Arkansas to cook us up some knee-slapping music. Before Cal had finished tracing the big winged D for DOGE’S PLACE on the front window, the saloon was shoulder-deep in drinking men, including a healthy salting of bad characters. That banjo rang and thrilled through the streets like the sweet song of the Sirens. Somebody even fired off a big horse pistol once or twice.

Our secret weapon sat at the bar. His fee was fifty dollars and all he could drink. Doge had donated a bottle of his finest, and I took up a collection for the rest, beginning with a greenback ten out of my own pocket. Gloyd was pretty far gone. He stared into his empty shot glass, mooing her name over and over like a heifer coming into heat. “Carry. Ohhh, Carry.”

It took her half an hour. On the nose. Up the street she came, grim and foreboding, her jackals and henchwomen in tow. I lounged against the doorframe, picking my teeth. The banjo rang in my ears. I could see their heads thrown back as they shrieked out the lyrics of some spiritual or other, and I felt the tremor as their glossy black boots descended on the pavement in unison, tramp, tramp, tramp. Up the street, arms locked, teeth flashing, uvulas aquiver. “He is my refuge and my fortress!” they howled. Tramp, tramp, tramp. She led them up the porch, shoved me aside, and bulled her way in.

Suddenly the place fell silent. The banjo choked off, yahoos and yip-hays were swallowed, chatter died. She raised her arm and the chorus swept up the scale to finish on a raging high C, pious and combative. Then she went into her act, snorting and stamping round the room till her wire-rimmed spectacles began to mist up with emotion. “Awake, ye drunkards, and weep!” she roared. “Howl, all ye drinkers of wine, for strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it.” She was towering, swollen, red-faced, awesome as a twister roaring up out of the southwest. We were stunned silent — Cal, Doge, McGurk, Pedro — all of us. But then, from the rear of the crowd, all the long way down the far end of the bar, came the low moan of ungulate distress. “Carrrrry, ohhhh baby, what have I done to you?”

The look on her face at that moment could have constituted a criminal act in itself. She was hideous. There was a scuffle of chairs and feet as we cleared out of her way, every man for himself. Doge ducked down behind the bar, Cal and McGurk sought refuge back of an overturned table, the bad characters made themselves scarce, and suddenly there were just the two of them — Mrs. Mad and Gloyd — staring into each other’s eyes across the vacant expanse of the barroom. Gloyd got down off the bar stool and started toward her, his gait shuffling and unsteady, his arms spread in a vague empty embrace. Suddenly the hatchet appeared in her hand, legerdemain, her knuckles clenched white round the handle. She was breathing like a locomotive, he was calm as comatose. She started toward him.

When they got within two yards of one another they stopped. Gloyd tottered, swaying on his feet, a lock of yellowed hair catching in his eye socket. “Carry,” he said, his voice rough and guttural. “Honey, peachblossom, come back to me, come back to your old Doc.” And then he winked at her.

She flushed red, but then got hold of herself and came back at him with the Big Book: “At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.”

He looked deep into her eyes, randy as an old coyote. “I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath overcome.” He was grinning. He raised his arms to embrace her and suddenly she lashed out at him with the hatchet, the arc and the savage swish of it as it sliced the air, missing him by a clean two feet or more. “Carry,” he said, his voice sad and admonishing. “Let bygones be bygones, honey, and come on back to your old Doc.” Her arm fell, the hatchet dropped to the floor. She hung her head. And then, just a whisper at first, he began crooning in a rusty old voice, soft and sad, quavering like a broken heart:

The huntsman he can’t hunt the fox,

Nor so loudly to blow his horn,

And the tinker he can’t mend kettle nor pot,

Without a little barleycorn.

When he finished we stood there silent — the women in black, the bad characters, Doge, Cal, McGurk and me — as though we’d just watched the big brocaded curtain fall across the stage of Tyler’s Playhouse in Kansas City. And then suddenly she fell to her knees sobbing — wailing and clucking in the back of her throat till I couldn’t tell if it was laughing or crying. Her sobs, like her fulminations, were thunderous — they filled the room, shook the rafters. I began to feel embarrassed. But the Doc, he just stood over her, hands on his hips, grinning, until one of the women — it was Lucy McGurk — helped her from the room.

The faces of her retinue were pale as death against their black bonnets and choirboy collars. No longer the core of a moral cyclone, they were just towns-women, teetotalers and pansies. We jeered like the bad characters we were, and they turned tail and ran.

A month later a wagon rumbled up Warsaw Street from the station with Doge’s new mahogany bar counter in back. McGurk and I took the afternoon off to sit in the cool dusk of Doge’s Place and watch Doge and Cal nail it down and put the first coat of wax on it. The new Vivian DeLorbe, a bit rippled, but right in the right spots, hung proudly, and a sort of mosaic mirror — made up of pieces salvaged from the original and set in plaster — cast its submarine reflections round the room. We had a couple of whiskeys, and then Doge mentioned he’d heard Mrs. Mad was back at it again, parching all the good citizens down in Wichita. Cal and I laughed, but poor John didn’t take it so well, seeing that Lucy had left him to go off with her and join the movement.

Cal shook his head. “These women,” he said. “There’s no stoppin ‘em. Next thing you know they’ll be wantin the vote.”

(1977)

THE HAT

They sent a hit squad after the bear. Three guys in white parkas with National Forestry Service patches on the shoulders. It was late Friday afternoon, about a week before Christmas, the snow was coming down so fast it seemed as if the sky and earth were glued together, and Jill had just opened up the lodge for drinks and dinner when they stamped in through the door. The tall one — he ordered shots of Jim Beam and beers for all of them — could have been a bear himself, hunched under the weight of his shoulders in the big quilted parka, his face lost in a bristle of black beard, something feral and challenging in the clash of his blue eyes. “Hello, pretty lady,” he said, looking Jill full in the face as he swung a leg over the barstool and pressed his forearms to the gleaming copper rail. “I hear you got a bear problem.”

I was sitting in the shadows at the end of the bar, nursing a beer and watching the snow. Jill hadn’t turned up the lights yet and I was glad — the place had a soothing underwater look to it, snow like a sheet stretched tight over the window, the fire in the corner gentle as a backrub. I was alive and moving — lighting a cigarette, lifting the glass to my lips — but I felt so peaceful I could have been dozing.

“That’s right,” Jill said, still flushing from the “pretty lady” remark. Two weeks earlier, in bed, she’d told me she hadn’t felt pretty in years. What are you talking about? I’d said. She dropped her lower lip and looked away. I gained twenty pounds, she said. I reached out to touch her, smiling, as if to say twenty pounds — what’s twenty pounds? Little Ball of Suet, I said, referring to one of the Maupassant stories in the book she’d given me. It’s not funny, she said, but then she’d rolled over and touched me back.

“Name’s Boo,” the big man said, pausing to throw back his bourbon and take a sip of beer. “This is Scott,” nodding at the guy on his left, also in beard and watchcap, “and Josh.” Josh, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, appeared on his right like a jack-in-the-box. Boo unzipped the parka to expose a thermal shirt the color of dried blood.

“Is this all together?” Jill asked.

Boo nodded, and I noticed the scar along the ridge of his cheekbone, thinking of churchkey openers, paring knives, the long hooked ivory claws of bears. Then he turned to me. “What you drinking, friend?”

I’d begun to hear sounds from the kitchen — the faint kiss of cup and saucer, the rattle of cutlery — and my stomach suddenly dropped like an elevator out of control. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was the middle of the month, I’d read all the paperbacks in the house, listened to all the records, and I was waiting for my check to come. There was no mail service up here of course — the road was closed half the time in winter anyway — but Marshall, the lodgeowner and unofficial kingpin of the community, had gone down the mountain to lay in provisions against the holiday onslaught of tourists, ski-mobilers and the like, and he’d promised to pick it up for me. If it was there. If it was, and he made it back through the storm, I was going to have three or four shots of Wild Turkey, then check out the family dinner and sip coffee and Kahlua till Jill got off work. “Beer,” I said.

“Would you get this man a beer, pretty lady?” said Boo in his backwoods basso, and when she’d opened me one and come back for his money, he started in on the bear. Had she seen him? How much damage had he done? What about his tracks — anything unusual? His scat? He was reddish in color, right? Almost cinnamon? And with one folded ear?

She’d seen him. But not when he’d battered his way into the back storeroom, punctured a case of twelve-and-a-half-ounce cans of tuna, lapped up a couple of gallons of mountain red burgundy and shards of glass, and left a bloody trail that wound off through the ponderosa pines like a pink ribbon. Not then. No, she’d seen him under more intimate circumstances — in her own bedroom, in fact. She’d been asleep in the rear bedroom with her eight-year-old son, Adrian (they slept in the same room to conserve heat, shutting down the thermostat and tossing a handful of coal into the stove in the corner), when suddenly the back window went to pieces. The air came in at them like a spearthrust, there was the dull booming thump of the bear’s big body against the outer wall, and an explosion of bottles, cans, and whatnot as he tore into the garbage on the back porch. She and Adrian had jolted awake in time to see the bear’s puzzled shaggy face appear in the empty windowframe, and then they were up like Goldilocks and out the front door, where they locked themselves in the car. They came to me in their pajamas, trembling like refugees. By the time I got there with my Weatherby, the bear was gone.

“I’ve seen him,” Jill said. “He broke the damn window out of my back bedroom and now I’ve got it all boarded up.” Josh, the younger guy, seemed to find this funny, and he began a low snickering suck and blow of air like an old dog with something caught in his throat.

“Hell,” Jill said, lighting up, centerstage, “I was in my nightie and barefoot too and I didn’t hesitate a second — zoom, I grabbed my son by the hand and out the door we went.”

“Your nightie, huh?” Boo said, a big appreciative grin transforming his face so that for a minute, in the dim light, he could have been a leering, hairy-hocked satyr come in from the cold.

“Maybe it wasn’t just the leftovers he wanted,” I offered, and everyone cracked up. Just then Marshall stepped through the door, arms laden, stamping the snow from his boots. I got up to help him, and when he began fumbling in his breast pocket, I felt a surge of relief: he’d remembered my check. I was on my way out the door to help with the supplies when I heard Boo’s rumbling bass like distant thunder: “Don’t you worry, pretty lady,” he was saying, “we’ll get him.”

Regina showed up three days later. For the past few years she’d rented a room up here over the holidays, ostensibly for her health, the cross-country skiing, and the change of scene, but actually so she could display her backend in stretch pants to the sex-crazed hermits who lived year-round amidst the big pines and sequoias. She was from Los Angeles, where she worked as a dental hygienist. Her teeth were perfect, she smiled nonstop and with the serenity of the Mona Lisa, and she wore the kind of bra that was popular in the fifties — the kind that thrust the breasts out of her ski sweater like nuclear warheads. She’d been known to give the tumble to the occasional tourist or one of the lucky locals when the mood took her, but she really had it for Marshall. For two weeks every Christmas and another week at Easter, she became a fixture at the bar, as much a part of the decor as the moosehead or the stuffed bear, perched on a barstool in Norwegian sweater, red ski pants, and mukluks, sipping a champagne cocktail and waiting for him to get off work. Sometimes she couldn’t hold out and someone else would walk off with her while Marshall scowled from behind the grill, but usually she just waited there for him like a flower about to drop its petals.

She came into the white world that afternoon like a foretaste of the good times to come — city women, weekend cowboys, grandmas, children, dogs, and lawyers were on their way, trees and decorations going up, the big festival of the goose-eating Christians about to commence — rolling into the snowbound parking lot in her Honda with the neat little chain-wrapped tires that always remind me of Tonka toys. It was about 4:00 P.M., the sky was a sorrowful gray, and a loose flurry was dusting the huge logs piled up on the veranda. In she came, stamping and shaking, the knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows, already on the lookout for Marshall.

I was sitting in my usual place, working on my fifth beer, a third of the way through the check Marshall had brought me three days previous and calculating gloomily that I’d be out of money by Christmas at this rate. Scooter was bartending, and his daughter-in-law Mae-Mae, who happened to be a widow, was hunched morosely over a Tom Collins three stools up from me. Mae-Mae had lost her husband to the mountain two years earlier (or, rather, to the tortuous road that connected us to civilization and snaked up 7300 feet from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley in a mere twenty-six miles, treacherous as a goat trail in the Himalayas), and hadn’t spoken or smiled since. She was a Thai. Scooter’s son, a Vietnam hero, had brought her back from Southeast Asia with him. When Jill was off, or the holiday crowd bearing down on the place, Scooter would drive up the mountain from his cabin at Little Creek, elevation 5500 feet, hang his ski parka on a hook in back, and shake, stir, and blend cocktails. He brought Mae-Mae with him to get her out of the house.

Scooter and I had been discussing some of the finer points of the prevent defense with respect to the coming pro-football playoffs when Regina’s Honda rolled into the lot, and now we gave it up to gape at her as she shook herself like a go-go dancer, opened her jacket to expose the jutting armaments of her breasts, and slid onto a barstool. Scooter slicked back his white hair and gave her a big grin. “Well,” he said, fumbling for her name, “um, uh, good to see you again.”

She flashed him her fluoridated smile, glanced past the absorbed Mae-Mae to where I sat grinning like an overworked dog, then turned back to him. “Marshall around?”

Scooter informed her that Marshall had gone down the mountain on a supply run and should be back by dinnertime. And what would she like?

She sighed, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. The hat she was wearing was part of a set — hand-knit, imported from Scandinavia, woven from ram’s whiskers by the trolls themselves, two hundred bucks at I. Magnin. Or something like that. It was gray, like her eyes. She swept it from her head with a flourish, fluffed out her short black hair and ordered a champagne cocktail. I looked at my watch.

I’d read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do? It was the same way up on the mountain. Big Timber was a collection of maybe a hundred widely scattered cabins atop a broad-beamed peak in the southern Sierras. The cabins belonged to summer people from L.A. and San Diego, to cross-country skiers, gynecologists, talent agents, ad men, drunks, and nature lovers, for the most part, and to twenty-seven hardcore antisocial types who called the place home year-round. I was one of this latter group. So was Jill. Of the remaining twenty-five xenophobes and rustics, three were women, and two of them were married and post-menopausal to boot. The sole remaining female was an alcoholic poet with a walleye who lived in her parents’ cabin on the outer verge of the development and hated men. TV reception was spotty, radio nonexistent, and the nearest library a one-room affair at the base of the mountain that boasted three copies of The Thorn Birds and the complete works of Irving Wallace.

And so we drank.

Social life, such as it was, revolved around Marshall’s lodge, which dispensed all the amenities in a single huge room, from burgers and chili omelets to antacid pills, cold remedies, cans of pickled beets, and toilet paper, as well as spirits, human fraternity, and a chance to fight off alien invaders at the controls of the video game in the corner. Marshall organized his Friday-night family dinners, did a turkey thing on Thanksgiving and Christmas, threw a New Year’s party, and kept the bar open on weekends through the long solitary winter, thinking not so much of profit, but of our sanity. The lodge also boasted eight woodsy hotel rooms, usually empty, but now — with the arrival of Boo and his fellow hit men, Regina, and a couple other tourists — beginning to fill up.

On the day Regina rolled in, Jill had taken advantage of the break in the weather to schuss down the mountain in her station wagon and do some Christmas shopping. I was supposed to have gone with her, but we’d had a fight. Over Boo. I’d come in the night before from my late-afternoon stroll to see Jill half spread across the bar with a blank bovine look on her face while Boo mumbled his baritone blandishments into her eyes from about six inches away. I saw that, and then I saw that she’d locked fingers with him, as if they’d been arm wrestling or something. Marshall was out in the kitchen, Josh was sticking it to the video game, and Scott must have been up in his room. “Hey,” Boo said, casually turning his head, “what’s happening?” Jill gave me a defiant look before extricating herself and turning her back to fool around with the cash register. I stood there in the doorway, saying nothing. Bishzz, bishzz went the video game, zoot-zoot-zoot. Marshall dropped something out in the kitchen. “Buy this man a drink, honey,” Boo said. I turned and walked out the door.

“Christ, I can’t believe you,” Jill had said when I came round to pick her up after work. “It’s my job, you know? What am I supposed to do, hang a sign around my neck that says ‘Property of M. Koerner’?”

I told her I thought that was a pretty good idea.

“Forget the ride,” she said. “I’m walking.”

“And what about the bear?” I said, knowing how the specter of it terrified her, knowing that she dreaded walking those dark snowlit roads for fear of chancing across him — knowing it and wanting for her to admit it, to tell me she needed me.

But all she said was “Screw the bear,” and then she was gone.

Now I ordered another beer, sauntered along the bar, and sat down one stool up from Regina. “Hi,” I said, “remember me? Michael Koerner? I live up back of Malloy’s place?”

She narrowed her eyes and gave me a smile I could feel all the way down in the remotest nodes of my reproductive tract. She no more knew me than she would have known a Chinese peasant plucked at random from the faceless hordes. “Sure,” she said.

We made small talk. How slippery the roads were — worse than last year. A renegade bear? Really? Marshall grew a beard?

I’d bought her two champagne cocktails and was working on yet another beer, when Jill catapulted through the door, arms festooned with foil-wrapped packages and eyes ablaze with goodwill and holiday cheer; Adrian tagged along at her side, looking as if he’d just sprung down from the back of a flying reindeer. If Jill felt put out by the spectacle of Regina — or more particularly by my proximity to and involvement in that spectacle — she didn’t miss a beat. The packages hit the bar with a thump, Scooter and Mae-Mae were treated to joyous salutatory squeals, Regina was embraced and I was ignored. Adrian went straight for the video game, pausing only to scoop up the six quarters I held out to him like an offering. Jill ordered herself a cocktail and started in on Regina, bantering away about hairstyles, nails, shoes, blouses, and the like as if she were glad to see her. “I just love that hat!” she shouted at one point, reaching out to finger the material. I swung round on my stool and stared out the window.

It was then that Boo came into sight. Distant, snow-softened, trudging across the barren white expanse of the lot as if in a dream. He was wearing his white parka, hood up, a rifle was slung over his shoulder, and he was dragging something behind him. Something heavy and dark, a long low-slung form that raveled out from his heels like a shadow. When he paused to straighten up and catch his streaming breath, I saw with a shock that the carcass of an animal lay at his feet, red and raw like a gash in the snow. “Hey!” I shouted. “Boo got the bear!” And the next minute we were all out in the windblown parking lot, hemmed in by the forbidding ranks of the trees and the belly of the gray deflated sky, as Boo looked up puzzled from the carcass of a gutted deer. “What happened, the bar catch fire?” he said, his sharp blue eyes parrying briefly with mine, swooping past Scooter, Adrian, and Mae-Mae to pause a moment over Jill and finally lock on Regina’s wide-eyed stare. He was grinning.

The deer’s black lip was pulled back from ratty yellowed teeth; its eyes were opaque in death. Boo had slit it from chest to crotch, and a half-frozen bulb of grayish intestine poked from the lower end of the ragged incision. I felt foolish.

“Bait,” Boo said in explanation, his eyes roving over us again. “I’m leaving a blood smear you could follow with your eyes closed and your nose stopped up. Then I’m going to hang the meat up a tree and wait for Mr. Bear.”

Jill turned away, a bit theatrically I thought, and made small noises of protest and disgust on the order of “the poor animal,” then took Adrian by the hand and pulled him back in the direction of the lodge. Mae-Mae stared through us all, this carnage like that other that had claimed her husband’s life, end over end in the bubble of their car, blood on the slope. Regina looked at Boo. He stood over the fallen buck, grinning like a troglodyte with his prey, then bent to catch the thing by its antlers and drag it off across the lot as if it were an old rug for the church rummage sale.

That night the lodge was hopping. Tourists had begun to trickle in and there were ten or twelve fresh faces at the bar. I ate a chicken pot pie and a can of cold beets in the solitude of my cabin, wrapped a tacky black-and-gold scarf round my neck, and ambled through the dark featureless forest to the lodge. As I stepped through the door I smelled perfume, sweet drinks, body heat, and caught the sensuous click of the pool balls as they punctuated the swell of riotous voices churning up around me. Holiday cheer, oh, yes, indeed.

(ill was tending bar. Everyone in the development was there, including the old wives and the walleyed poetess. An array of roaring strangers and those recognized vaguely from previous seasons stood, slouched, and stamped round the bar or huddled over steaks in the booths to the rear. Marshall was behind the grill. I eased up to the bar between a bearded stranger in a gray felt cowboy hat and a familiar-looking character who shot me a glance of mortal dislike and then turned away. I was absently wondering what I could possibly have done to offend this guy (winter people — I could hardly remember what I’d said and done last week, let alone last year), when I spotted Regina. And Boo. They were sitting at a booth, the table before them littered with empty glasses and beer bottles. Good, I said to myself, an insidious little smile of satisfaction creeping across my lips, and I glanced toward Jill.

I could see that she was watching them out of the corner of her eye, though an impartial observer might have guessed she was giving her full attention to Alf Cornwall, the old gas bag who sat across the bar from her and toyed with a glass of peppermint schnapps while he went on ad nauseam about the only subject dear to him — i.e., the lamentable state of his health. “Jill,” I barked with malicious joy, “how about some service down here?”

She gave me a look that would have corroded metal, then heaved back from the bar and poured me a long slow shot of Wild Turkey and an even slower glass of beer. I winked at her as she set the drinks down and scraped my money from the bar. “Not tonight, Michael,” she said, “I don’t feel up to it,” and her tone was so dragged down and lugubrious she could have been a professional mourner. It was then that I began to realize just how much Boo had affected her (and by extension, how little I had), and I glanced over my shoulder to focus a quick look of jealous hatred on him. When Jill set down my change I grabbed her wrist. “What the hell do you mean ‘not tonight,’” I hissed. “Now I can’t even talk to you, or what?”

She looked at me like a martyr, like a twenty-eight-year-old woman deserted by her husband in the backend of nowhere and saddled with an unhappy kid and a deadbeat sometime beau to whom the prospect of marriage was about as appealing as a lobotomy, she looked at me like a woman who’s given up on romance. Then she jerked her arm away and slouched off to hear all the fascinating circumstances attending Alf Cornwall’s most recent bowel movement.

The crowd began to thin out about eleven, and Marshall came out from behind the grill to saunter up to the bar for a Rémy-Martin. He too seemed preter-naturally interested in Alf Cornwall’s digestive tract, and sniffed meditatively at his cognac for five minutes or so before he picked up the glass and strolled over to join Boo and Regina. He slid in next to Regina, nodding and smiling, but he didn’t look too pleased.

Like Boo, Marshall was big. Big-hearted, big-bellied, with grizzled hair and a beard flecked with white. He was in his mid-forties, twice divorced, and he had a casual folksy way about him that women found appealing, or unique — or whatever. Women who came up the mountain, that is. Jill had had a thing with him the year before I moved in, he was one of the chief reasons the walleyed poetess hated men, and any number of cross-country ski bunnies, doctors’ wives, and day trippers had taken some extracurricular exercise in the oak-framed waterbed that dominated his room in the back of the lodge. Boo didn’t stand a chance. Ten minutes after Marshall had sat down Boo was back up at the bar, a little unsteady from all he’d had to drink, and looking Jill up and down like he had one thing on his mind.

I was on my third shot and fifth beer, the lights were low, the fire going strong, and the twenty-foot Christmas tree lit up like a satellite. Alf Cornwall had taken his bullshit home with him; the poetess, the wives, and two-thirds of the new people had cleared out. I was discussing beach erosion with the guy in the cowboy hat, who as it turned out was from San Diego, and keeping an eye on Boo and Jill at the far end of the bar. “Well, Christ,” San Diego roared as if I was half a mile away, “you put up them godforsaken useless damn seawalls and what have you got, I ask you? Huh?”

I wasn’t listening. Boo was stroking Jill’s hand like a glove salesman, Marshall and Regina were grappling in the booth, and I was feeling sore and hurt and left out. A log burned through and tumbled into the coals with a thud. Marshall got up to poke it, and all of a sudden I was seething. Turning my back on San Diego, I pushed off of my stool and strode to the end of the bar.

Jill saw the look on my face and drew back. I put my hand on Boo’s shoulder and watched him turn to me in slow motion, his face huge, the scar glistening over his eyebrow. “You can’t do that,” I said.

He just looked at me.

“Michael,” Jill said.

“Huh?” he said. “Do what?” Then he turned his head to look at Jill, and when he swung back round he knew.

I shoved him, hard, as he was coming up off the barstool, and he went down on one knee before he caught himself and lunged at me. He would have destroyed me if Marshall hadn’t caught hold of him, but I didn’t care. As it was, he gave me one terrific shot to the breastbone that flattened me against the bar and sent a couple of glasses flying. Bang, bang, they shattered on the flagstone floor like lightbulbs dropped from a ladder.

“Goddamnit,” Marshall was roaring, “that’s about enough.” His face was red to the roots of his whiskers. “Michael,” he said — or blared, I should say — and then he waved his hand in disgust. Boo stood behind him, giving me a bad look. “I think you’ve had enough, Michael,” Marshall said. “Go on home.”

I wanted to throw it right back in his face, wanted to shout obscenities, take them both on, break up the furniture, and set the tree afire, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sixteen: I was thirty-one years old and I was reasonable. The lodge was the only bar in twenty-six miles and I’d be mighty thirsty and mighty lonely both if I was banished for good. “All right,” I said. “All right.” And then, as I shrugged into my jacket: “Sorry.”

Boo was grinning, Jill looked like she had the night the bear broke in. Regina was studying me with either interest or amusement — I couldn’t tell which — Scooter looked like he had to go to the bathroom, and San Diego just stepped aside. I pulled the door closed behind me. Softly.

Outside, it was snowing. Big, warm, healing flakes. It was the kind of snow my father used to hold his hands out to, murmuring, God must be up there plucking chickens. I wrapped the scarf round my throat and was about to start off across the lot when I saw something moving through the blur of falling flakes. The first thing I thought of was some late arrival from down below, some part-timer come to claim his cabin. The second thing I thought of was the bear.

I was wrong on both counts. The snow drove down against the dark branchless pillars of the treetrunks, chalk strokes on a blackboard, I counted off three breaths, and then Mae-Mae emerged from the gloom. “Michael?” she said, coming up to me.

I could see her face in the yellow light that seeped through the windows of the lodge and lay like a fungus on the surface of the snow. She gave me a rare smile, and then her face changed as she touched a finger to the corner of my mouth. “What happen you?” she said, and her finger glistened with blood.

I licked my lip. “Nothing. Bit my lip, I guess.” The snow caught like confetti in the feathery puff of her hair and her eyes tugged at me from the darkness. “Hey,” I said, surprised by inspiration, “you want to maybe come up to my place for a drink?”

Next day, at dusk, I was out in the woods with my axe. The temperature was about ten degrees above zero, I had a pint of Presidente to keep me warm, and I was looking for a nice round-bottomed silver fir about five feet tall. I listened to the snow groan under my boots, watched my breath hang in the air; I looked around me and saw ten thousand little green trees beneath the canopy of the giants, none of them right. By the time I found what I was looking for, the snow had drunk up the light and the trees had become shadows.

As I bent to clear the snow from the base of the tree I’d selected, something made me glance over my shoulder. Failing light, logs under the snow, branches, hummocks. At first I couldn’t make him out, but I knew he was there. Sixth sense. But then, before the shaggy silhouette separated itself from the gloom, a more prosaic sense took over: I could smell him. Shit, piss, sweat, and hair, dead meat, bad breath, the primal stink. There he was, a shadow among shadows, big around as a fallen tree, the bear, watching me.

Nothing happened. I didn’t grin him down, fling the axe at him, or climb a tree, and he didn’t lumber off in a panic, throw himself on me with a bloody roar, or climb a tree either. Frozen like an ice sculpture, not even daring to come out of my crouch for fear of shattering the moment, I watched the bear. Communed with him. He was a renegade, a solitary, airlifted in a groggy stupor from Yosemite, where he’d become too familiar with people. Now he was familiar with me. I wondered if he’d studied my tracks as I’d studied his, wondered what he was doing out in the harsh snowbound woods instead of curled cozily in his den. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The woods went dark. I stood up. He was gone.

Christmas was a pretty sad affair. Talk of post-holiday depression, I had it before, during, and after. I was broke, Jill and I were on the outs, I’d begun to loathe the sight of three-hundred-foot trees and snow-capped mountains, and I liked the rest of humanity about as much as Gulliver liked the Yahoos. I did stop by Jill’s place around six to share a miserable, tight-lipped meal with her and Adrian and exchange presents. I gave Adrian a two-foot-high neon-orange plastic dragon from Taiwan that spewed up puddles of reddish stuff that looked like vomit, and I gave Jill a cheap knit hat with a pink pom-pom on top. She gave me a pair of gloves. I didn’t stay for coffee.

New Year’s was different.

I gave a party, for one thing. For another, I’d passed from simple misanthropy to nihilism, death of the spirit, and beyond. It was 2:00 A.M., everybody in the lodge was wearing party hats, I’d kissed half the women in the place — including a reluctant Jill, pliant Regina, and sour-breathed poetess — and I felt empty and full, giddy, expansive, hopeful, despondent, drunk. “Party at my place,” I shouted as Marshall announced last call and turned up the lights. “Everybody’s invited.”

Thirty bon vivants tramped through the snowy streets, blowing party horns and flicking paper ticklers at one another, fired up snowmobiles, Jeeps, and pickups, carried open bottles out of the bar, and hooted at the stars. They filled my little place like fish in a net, squirming against one another, grinning and shouting, making out in the loft, vomiting in the toilet, sniggering around the fireplace. Boo was there, water under the bridge. Jill too. Marshall, Regina, Scooter, Mae-Mae, Josh and Scott, the poetess, San Diego, and anybody else who happened to be standing under the moosehead in a glossy duncecap when I made my announcement. Somebody put on a reggae album that sent seismic shudders through the floor, and people began to dance. I was out in the kitchen fumbling with the ice-cube tray when Regina banged through the door with a bar glass in her hand. She gave me a crooked smile and held it out to me. “What’re you drinking?” she asked.

“Pink Boys,” I said. “Vodka, crushed ice, and pink lemonade, slushed in the blender.”

“Pink Boys,” Regina said, or tried to say. She was wearing her knit hat and matching sweater, the hat pulled down to her eyebrows, the sweater unbuttoned halfway to her navel. I took the glass from her and she moved into me, caught hold of my biceps, and stuck her tongue in my mouth. A minute later I had her pinned up against the stove, exploring her exemplary dentition with the tip of my own tongue and dipping my hand into that fabulous sweater as if into the mother lode itself.

I had no problems with any of this. I gave no thought to motives, mores, fidelity, or tomorrow: I was a creature of nature, responding to natural needs. Besides which, Jill was locked in an embrace with Marshall in the front room, the old satyr and king of the mountain reestablishing a prior claim, Boo was hunched over the fire with Mae-Mae, giving her the full flash of his eyes and murmuring about bear scat in a voice so deep it would have made Johnny Cash turn pale, and Josh and the poetess were joyfully deflating Edna St. Vincent Mil-lay while swaying their bodies awkwardly to Bob Marley’s voodoo backbeat. New Year’s Eve. It was like something out of La Ronde.

By three-thirty, I’d been rejected by Regina, who’d obviously been using me as a decoy, Marshall and Jill had disappeared and rematerialized twice, Regina had tried unsuccessfully to lure Boo away from Mae-Mae (who was now secreted with him in the bedroom), San Diego had fallen and smashed my coffee table to splinters, one half-gallon of vodka was gone and we were well into the second, and Josh and the poetess had exchanged addresses. Auld lang syne, I thought, surveying the wreckage and moodily crunching taco chips while a drunken San Diego raved in my ear about dune buggies, outboard engines, and tuna rigs. Marshall and Jill were holding hands. Regina sat across the room, looking dangerous. She’d had four or five Pink Boys, on top of what she’d consumed at the lodge, but who was counting? Suddenly she stood — or, rather, jumped to her feet like a marine assaulting a beachhead — and began to gather her things.

What happened next still isn’t clear. Somehow her hat had disappeared — that was the start of it. At first she just bustled round the place, overturning piles of scarves and down jackets, poking under the furniture, scooting people from the couch and easy chair, but then she turned frantic. The hat was a keepsake, an heirloom. Brought over from Flekkefjord by her great-grandmother, who’d knitted it as a memento of Olaf the Third’s coronation, or something like that. Anyway, it was irreplaceable. More precious than the Magna Carta, the Shroud of Turin, and the Hope Diamond combined. She grew shrill.

Someone cut the stereo. People began to shuffle their feet. One clown — a total stranger — made a show of looking behind the framed photograph of Dry Gulch, Wyoming, that hangs beside the fireplace. “It’ll turn up,” I said.

Regina had scattered a heap of newspapers over the floor and was frantically riffling through the box of kindling in the corner. She turned on me with a savage look. “The hell it will,” she snarled. “Somebody stole it.”

“Stole it?” I echoed.

“That’s right,” she said, the words coming fast now. She was looking at Jill. “Some bitch. Some fat-assed jealous bitch that just can’t stand the idea of somebody showing her up. Some, some—”

She didn’t get a chance to finish. Jill was up off the couch like something coming out of the gate at Pamplona and suddenly the two of them were locked in combat, pulling hair and raking at one another like Harpies. Regina was cursing and screeching at the same time; Jill went for the vitals. I didn’t know what to do. San Diego made the mistake of trying to separate them, and got his cheek raked for the effort. Finally, when they careened into the pole lamp and sent it crashing to the floor with a climactic shriek of broken glass, Marshall took hold of Regina from behind and wrestled her out the door, while I did my best to restrain Jill.

The door slammed. Jill shrugged loose, heaving for breath, and turned her back on me. There were twenty pale astonished faces strung round the room like Japanese lanterns. A few of the men looked sheepish, as if they’d stolen a glimpse of something they shouldn’t have. No one said a word. Just then Boo emerged from the bedroom, Mae-Mae in tow. “What’s all the commotion?” he said.

I glanced around the room. All of a sudden I felt indescribably weary. “Party’s over,” I said.

I woke at noon with a hangover. I drank from the tap, threw some water in my face, and shambled down to the lodge for breakfast. Marshall was there, behind the grill, looking as if he was made of mashed potatoes. He barely noticed as I shuffled in and took a window seat among a throng of chipper, alert, and well-fed tourists.

I was leafing through the Chronicle and puffing away at my third cup of coffee when I saw Regina’s car sail past the window, negotiate the turn at the end of the lot, and swing onto the road that led down the mountain. I couldn’t be sure — it was a gloomy day, the sky like smoke — but as near as I could tell she was hatless. No more queen of the mountain for her, I thought. No more champagne cocktails and the tight thrilling clasp of spandex across the bottom — from here on out it was stinking mouths and receding gums. I turned back to the newspaper.

When I looked up again, Boo, Josh, and Scott were stepping out of a Jeep Cherokee, a knot of gawkers and Sunday skiers gathered round them. Draped over the hood of the thing, still red at the edges with raw meat and blood, was a bearskin, head intact. The fur was reddish, almost cinnamon-colored, and one ear was folded down. I watched as Boo ambled up to the door, stepped aside for a pair of sixteen-year-old ski bunnies with layered hair, and then pushed his way into the lodge.

He took off his shades and stood there a moment in the doorway, carefully wiping them on his parka before slipping them into his breast pocket. Then he started toward the cash register, already easing back to reach for his wallet. “Hey,” he said when he saw me, and he stopped to lean over the table for a moment. “We got him,” he said, scraping bottom with his baritone and indicating the truck beyond the window with a jerk of his head. There was a discoloration across the breast of his white parka, a brownish spatter. I swiveled my head to glance out the window, then turned back to him, feeling as if I’d had the wind punched out of me. “Yeah,” I said.

There was a silence. He looked at me, I looked at him. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you take care,” and then he strode up to the cash register to pay his bill and check out.

Jill came in about one. She was wearing shades too, and when she slipped behind the bar and removed them, I saw the black-and-blue crescent under her right eye. As for Marshall, she didn’t even give him a glance. Later, after I’d been through the paper twice and figured it was time for a Bloody Mary or two and some Bowl games, I took a seat at the bar. “Hi, Michael,” she said, “what’ll you have?” and her tone was so soft, so contrite, so sweet and friendly and conciliatory, that I could actually feel the great big heaving plates of the world shifting back into alignment beneath my feet.

Oh, yes, the hat. A week later, when the soot and dust and woodchips around the cabin got too much for me, I dragged out the vacuum cleaner for my semiannual sweep around the place. I scooted over the rug, raked the drapes, and got the cobwebs in the corners. When I turned over the cushions on the couch, the wand still probing, I found the hat. There was a label inside. JCPenney, it read, $7.95. For a long moment I just stood there, turning the thing over in my hand. Then I tossed it in the fire.

(1984)

WHALES WEEP

I don’t know what it was exactly — the impulse toward preservation in the face of flux, some natal fascination with girth — who can say? But suddenly, in the winter of my thirty-first year, I was seized with an overmastering desire to seek out the company of whales. That’s right: whales. Flukes and blowholes. Leviathan. Moby Dick.

People talked about the Japanese, the Russians. Factory ships, they said. Dwindling numbers and a depleted breeding stock, whales on the wane. I wanted desperately to see them before they sang their swan song, before they became a mere matter of record, cards in an index, skeletal remains strung out on coat hangers and suspended from the high concave ceilings of the Smithsonian like blueprints of the past. More: I wanted to know them, smell them, touch them. I wanted to mount their slippery backs in the high seas, swim amongst them, come to understand their expansive gestures, sweeping rituals, their great whalish ecstasies and stupendous sorrows.

This cetaceamania was not something that came on gradually, a predilection that developed over a period of months into interest, awareness, and finally absorption — not at all. No: it took me by storm. Of course I’d been at least marginally aware of the plight of whales and dolphins for years, blitzed as I was by pleas from the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Save the Whales people. I gave up tuna fish. Wrote a letter to my congressman. Still, I’d never actually seen a whale and can’t say that I was any more concerned about cetaceans than I was about the mountain gorilla, inflation, or the chemicals in processed foods. Then I met Harry Macey.

It was at a party, somewhere in the East Fifties. One of those seasonal affairs: Dom Pérignon, cut crystal, three black girls whining over a prerecorded disco track. Furs were in. Jog togs. The hustle. Health. I was with Stephanie King, a fashion model. She was six feet tall, irises like well water, the de rigueur mole at the corner of her mouth. Like most of the haute couture models around town, she’d developed a persona midway between Girl Scout and vampire. I did not find it at all unpalatable.

Stephanie introduced me to a man in beard, blazer, and bifocals. He was rebuking an elderly woman for the silver-fox boa dangling from her neck. “Disgusting,” he snarled, working himself into a froth. “Savage and vestigial. What do you think we’ve developed synthetics for?” His hair was like the hair of Kennedys, boyish, massed over his brow, every strand shouting for attention; his eyes were cold and messianic. He rattled off a list of endangered species, from snail darter to three-toed sloth, his voice sucking mournfully at each syllable as if he were a rabbi uttering the secret names of God. Then he started on whales. I cleared my throat and held out my hand. “Call me Roger,” I said. He didn’t even crack a smile. Just widened his sphere of influence to include Stephanie and me. “The blue whale,” he was saying, flicking the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray he held supine in his palm, “is a prime example. One hundred feet long, better than a quarter of a million pounds. By far and away the largest creature ever to inhabit the earth. His tongue alone weighs three tons, and his penis, nine and a half feet long, would dwarf a Kodiak bear. And how do we reward this exemplar of evolutionary impetus?” He paused and looked at me like a quiz-show host. Stephanie, who had handed her lynx maxicoat to the hostess when we arrived, bowed twice, muttered something unintelligible, and wandered off with a man in dreadlocks. The old woman was asleep. I shrugged my shoulders.

“We hunt him to the brink of extinction, that’s how. We boil him down and convert him into margarine, pet food, shoe polish, lipstick.”

This was Harry Macey. He was a marine biologist connected with NYU and, as I thought at the time, something of an ass. But he did have a point. Never mind his bad breath and egomania; his message struck a chord. As he talked on, lecturing now, his voice modulating between anger, conviction, and a sort of evangelical fervor, I began to develop a powerful visceral sympathy with him. Whales, I thought, sipping at my champagne. Magnificent, irreplaceable creatures, symbols of the wild and all that, brains the size of ottomans, courting, making love, chirping to one another in the fathomless dark — just as they’d been doing for sixty million years. And all this was threatened by the greed of the Japanese and the cynicism of the Russians. Here was something you could throw yourself into, an issue that required no soul-searching, good guys and bad as clearly delineated as rabbits and hyenas.

Macey’s voice lit the deeps, illuminated the ages, fired my enthusiasm. He talked of the subtle intelligence of these peaceful, lumbering mammals, of their courage and loyalty to one another in the face of adversity, of their courtship and foreplay and the monumental suboceanic sex act itself. I drained my glass, shut my eyes, and watched an underwater pas de deux: great shifting bulks pressed to one another like trains in collision, awesome, staggering, drums and bass pounding through the speakers until all I could feel through every cell of my body was that fearful, seismic humping in the depths.

Two weeks later I found myself bobbing about in a rubber raft somewhere off the coast of British Columbia. It was raining. The water temperature was thirty-four degrees. A man unlucky enough to find himself immersed in such water would be dead of exposure inside of five minutes. Or so I was told.

I was given this morsel of information by either Nick, Gary, or Ernie, my companions in the raft. All three were in their mid-twenties, wild-eyed and bearded, dressed in Norwegian sweaters, rain slickers, and knit skullcaps. They were aficionados of rock and roll, drugs, airplanes, and speedboats. They were also dangerous lunatics dedicated to thrusting themselves between the warheads of six-foot, quadri-barbed, explosive harpoons and the colossal rushing backs of panic-stricken whales.

At the moment, however, there were no whales to be seen. Living whales, at any rate. The carcasses of three sei whales trailed behind the rictus of a Russian factory ship, awaiting processing. A low cloud cover, purple-gray, raveled out from horizon to horizon like entrails on a butcher’s block, while the Russian ship loomed above us, its endless rust-streaked bows high as the Jersey palisades, the stony Slavic faces of the Russian seamen ranged along the rail like a string of peas. There were swells eight feet high. All around us the sea was pink with the blood of whales and sliced by the great black dorsal fins of what I at first took to be sharks. A moment later I watched a big grinning killer whale rush up out of the depths and tear a chunk of meat the size of a Holstein from one of the carcasses.

Nick was lighting his pipe. “Uh,” I said, “shouldn’t we be getting back to the ship?”

If he heard me, he gave no sign of it. He was muttering under his breath and jerking angrily at his knuckles. He took a long, slow hit from a tarnished flask, then glared up at the stoic Russian faces and collectively gave them the finger. “Murderers!” he shouted. “Cossack faggots!”

I was on assignment for one of the news magazines, and I’d managed to come up with some expense money from Audubon as well. The news magazine wanted action shots of the confrontation between the whalers and Nick, Gary, and Ernie; Audubon wanted some wide-angles of spouting whales for an article by some cetologist studying the lung capacity of the minke. I’d talked them into the assignment. Like a fool. For the past few years I’d been doing pretty well on the fashion circuit (I’d done some Junior Miss things for Sears and Bloomingdale’s and freelanced for some of the women’s magazines), but had begun to feel that I was missing something. Call it malaise, call it boredom. I was making a living, but what was I doing for the generations of mankind? Saving the whales — or at least doing my part in it — seemed a notch or two higher on the ethical scale than inflaming the lust of pubescent girls for snakeskin boots and fur collars. And what’s more, I was well equipped to do it, having begun my career as a naturalist.

That’s right: I too had my youthful illusions. I was just six months out of college when I did my study of the bearded tit for the National Geographic, and I was flush with success and enthusiasm. The following year Wildlife sent me up the Xingu to record the intimate life of the capybara. I waded through swamps, wet to my waist, crouched behind blinds for days on end, my skin black with mosquitoes though I didn’t dare slap them for fear of spooking my quarry. I was bitten by three different species of arachnids. I contracted bilharziasis. It was then that I decided to trade in my telephoto lens and devote myself to photographing beautiful women with haunted eyes in clean, airy studios.

Nick was on his feet now, fighting for balance as the waves tossed our raft. “Up Brezhnev!” he shrieked, the cords in his neck tight as hawsers.

Suddenly one of the Russians reared back and threw something at us, something round and small. I watched its trajectory as it shot out over the high bow of the ship and arced gracefully for us. It landed with a rush of air and a violent elastic hiss like a dozen rubber bands snapping simultaneously. The missile turned out to be a grapefruit, frozen hard as a brick. It tore a hole through the floor of the raft.

After the rescue, I spent a few days in a hospital in Vancouver, then flew back to New York. Gary — or was it Ernie? — lost two toes. I took a nasty crack over the eyebrow that required nineteen stitches and made me look either rakish or depraved, depending on your point of view. The photos, for which I’d been given an advance, were still in the camera — about thirty fathoms down. Still, things wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the headaches. Headaches that began with a quick stab at something beneath the surface of the eye and then built with a steadily mounting pressure until the entire left side of my head felt like a helium balloon and I began to understand that I was no longer passionate on the subject of whales. After all, the only whales I’d managed to catch sight of were either dead, dying, or sprinting for their lives in a rush of foam. Where was the worth and beauty in that? And where, I wondered, was the affirmation these diluvian and mystical beasts were supposed to inject into my own depleted life?

The night I got in, Stephanie showed up at my apartment with a bottle of Appleton’s rum. We made piña coladas and love. There was affirmation in that. In the morning, 7:00 A.M., Harry Macey was at the door in a warm-up suit. He whistled at the stitching over my eye, compared me unfavorably with Frankenstein’s monster, offered me a dried lemon peel, and sat down at the kitchen table. “All right,” he barked, “let’s have it — all the details. Currents, sightings, the Russian take — everything.” I reconstructed the trip for him over Red Zinger and granola, while he nodded and spooned, spooned and nodded, filing mental notes. But before I’d even got halfway he cut me off, jumped up from the table, and told me there was someone I just had to meet, right away, no arguments, a person I could really relate to.

I looked up from my granola, head throbbing. He was standing over me, shot through with energy, tugging at his ear, blowing the steam from his teacup, all but dancing. “I know you’re going to love him,” he said. “The man knows whales inside and out.”

Eyolf Holluson lived in a two-room apartment on East Twenty-sixth Street. He was eighty-six years old. We mounted the steps two at a time — all five flights — and stood outside the door while Harry counted his heartbeats. “Forty-four a minute,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Nothing when you consider the lungfish, but not bad for a man of thirty-nine.” In the process, my own heart seemed to have migrated to my head, where it was pounding like a letterpress over my left eye.

A voice, high and nasal, shaken with vibrato, echoed from behind the door. “Harry?”

Harry answered in the affirmative, the voice indicated that the door was open, and we stepped into a darkened room lit only by flashing Christmas bulbs and smelling of corned beef and peppermint. On the far side of the room, lost in the folds of a massive, dun-colored armchair draped with layers of doily and antimacassar, sat Eyolf. Before him was a TV tray, and beyond that a color TV, pictures flashing, sound turned off.

“Eyolf,” Harry said, “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine — he’s come to talk about whales.”

The old man turned and squinted up at me over the top of his steel-rimmed spectacles, then turned back to the tray. “Oh yah,” he said. “Yust finishing up my breakfast.” He was eating corned beef, plum tomatoes from the can, dinner mints.

Harry prompted him. “Eyolf fished whales for fifty-seven years — first with the Norwegian fleet, and then, when they packed it in, with the Portuguese off the Canary Islands.”

“The old way,” Eyolf said, his mouth a stew of mint and tomato. “Oars and harpoons.”

We crossed the room and settled into a spongy loveseat that smelled of cat urine. Harry produced a pocket-sized tape recorder, flicked it on, and placed it on the TV tray beside the old man’s plate. Then he sank back into the loveseat, crossed his legs at the knee, and said, “Tell us about it, Eyolf.”

The old man was wearing a plaid bathrobe and slippers. His frame was big, flesh wasted, his skin the color and texture of beef jerky. He talked for two hours, the strange nasal voice creaking like oars in their locks, rising and falling like the tide. He told us of a sperm whale that had overturned a chase boat in the Sea of Japan, of shipmates towed out of sight and lost in the Antarctic, of a big Swede who lost his leg in a fight with flensing knives. With a crack of his knees he rose up out of the chair and took a harpoon down from the wall, cocked his arm, and told us how he’d struck a thousand whales, hot blood spurting in his face over the icy spume, how it tasted and how his heart rushed with the chase. “You stick him,” he said, “and it’s like sticking a woman. Better.”

There was a copy of the Norsk Hvalfangst-Tildende on the table. Behind me, mounted on hooks, was a scrimshaw pipe, and beside it a huge blackened sheet of leather, stiff with age. I ran my finger along its abrasive edge, wondering what it was — a bit of fluke, tongue? — and yet somehow, in a dim grope of intuition, knowing.

Eyolf was spinning a yarn about a sperm whale that had surfaced beneath him with an eighteen-foot squid clenched in its jaws when he turned to me. “I think maybe you are wondering what is this thing like a bullfighter’s cape hanging from Eyolfs wall?” I nodded. “A present from the captain of the Freya, nearly forty years back, it was. In token of my take of finback and bowhead over a period of two, three hectic weeks. Hectic, oh yah. Blood up to my knees — hot first, then cold. There was blood in my shoes at night.”

“The leather, Eyolf,” Harry said. “Tell Roger about it.”

“Oh yah,” he said, looking at me now as if I were made of plastic. “This here is off of the biggest creater on God’s earth. The sulfur-bottom, what you call the blue. I keep it here for vigor and long life.”

The old man gingerly lifted it from the wall and handed it to me. It was the size of a shower curtain, rigid as tree bark. Eyolf was smiling and nodding. “Solid, no?” He stood there, looking down at me, trembling a bit with one of his multiple infirmities.

“So what is it?” I said, beginning to lose patience.

“You don’t know?” He was picking his ear. “This here is his foreskin.”

Out on the street Harry said he had a proposition for me. A colleague of his was manning a whale watch off the Península Valdés on the Patagonian coast. He was studying the right whale on its breeding grounds and needed some high-quality photographs to accompany the text of a book he was planning. Would I take the assignment for a flat fee?

My head throbbed at the thought of it. “Will you come along with me?”

Harry looked surprised. “Me?” Then he laughed. “Hell no, are you kidding? I’ve got classes to teach, I’m sitting on a committee to fund estuarine research, I’m committed for six lectures on the West Coast.”

“I just thought—”

“Look, Roger — whales are fascinating and they’re in a lot of trouble. I’m hoping to do a monograph on the reproductive system of the rorquals, in fact, but I’m no field man. Actually, pelagic mammals are almost as foreign to my specialty area as elephants.”

I was puzzled. “Your specialty area?”

“I study holothurians. My dissertation was on the sea cucumber.” He looked a little abashed. “But I think big.”

The Patagonian coast of Argentina is a desolate, godforsaken place, swept by perpetual winds, parched for want of rain, home to such strange and hardy creatures as the rhea, crested tinamou, and Patagonian fox. Darwin anchored with the Beagle here in 1832, rowed ashore and described a dozen new species. Wildlife abounded. The rocks were crowded with birds — kelp and dolphin gulls, cormorants in the thousands, the southern lapwing, red-backed hawk, tawny-throated dotterel. Penguins and sea lions lolled among the massed black boulders and bobbed in the green swells, fish swarmed offshore, and copepods — ten billion for each star in the sky — thickened the Falkland current until it took on the consistency of porridge. Whales gathered for the feast. Rights, finbacks, minkes — Darwin watched them spouting and lobtailing, sounding and surfacing, courting, mating, calving.

Nothing has changed here — but for the fact that there are fewer whales now. The cormorants and penguins and seals are still there, numbers uncountable, still battening on the rich potage that washes the littoral. And still undisturbed by man — with one small exception. The Tsunamis. Shuhei, Grace, and their three daughters. For five months out of the year the Tsunamis occupy the Península Valdés, living in a concrete bunker, eating pots of rice, beans, and fish, battling the wind and the loneliness, watching whales.

Stephanie and I landed with the supply plane, not two hundred feet from the Tsunami bunker. It was August, and the right whales were mating. During the intervening months I’d nursed my split head, drained pitchers of piña coladas, and gone back to the Junior Miss circuit. But I kept in touch with Harry Macey, read ravenously on the subject of whales, joined Greenpeace, and flew to Tokyo for the trial of six members of a cetacean terrorist group accused of harpooning a Japanese industrialist at the Narita airport. I attended lectures, looked at slides, visited Nantucket. At night, after a long day in the studio, I closed my eyes and whales slipped through the Stygian sea of my dreams. There was no denying them.

Grace was waiting for us as the Cessna touched down: hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, eyes like polished walnut. The girls were there too — Gail, Amy, and Melia — bouncing, craning their necks, rabid with excitement at the prospect of seeing two new faces in the trackless waste. Shuhei was off in the dunes somewhere, in a welter of sonar dishes, listening for whales.

I shook hands with Grace; Stephanie, in a blast of perfume and windswept hair, pecked her cheek. Stephanie was wearing sealskin boots, her lynx coat, and a “Let Them Live” T-shirt featuring the flukes of a sounding whale. She had called me two days before I was scheduled to leave and said that she needed a vacation. Okay, I told her, glad to have you. She found a battery-operated hair dryer and a pith helmet at the Abercrombie & Fitch closeout sale, a wolf-lined parka at Max Bogen, tents, alcohol stoves, and freeze-dried Stroganoff at Paragon; she mail-ordered a pair of khaki puttees and sheepskin mukluks from L. L. Bean, packed up her spare underwear, eyeshadow, three gothic romances, and six pounds of dried apricots, and here she was, in breezy Patagonia, ready for anything.

“Christ!” she shouted, over the roar of the wind. “Does it always blow like this?” It was howling in off the sea, a steady fifty knots.

Grace was grinning, hood up, hair in her face. With her oblate eyes and round face and the suggestion of the hood, she looked like an Eskimo. “I was just going to say,” she shouted, “this is calm for the Península Valdés.”

That night we sat around the Franklin stove, eating game pie and talking whale. Grace was brisk and efficient, cooking, serving, clearing up, joking, padding round the little room in shorts and white sweat socks. Articulated calves, a gap between the thighs: earth mother, I thought. Shuhei was brooding and hesitant, born in Osaka (Grace was from L.A.). He talked at length about his project, of chance and probability, of graphs, permutations, and species-replacement theory. He was dull. When he attempted a witticism — a play on “flukes,” I think it was — it caught us unaware and he turned red.

Outside the wind shrieked and gibbered. The girls giggled in their bunks. We burned our throats on Shuhei’s sake and watched the flames play over the logs. Stephanie was six feet long, braless and luxuriant. She yawned and stretched. Shuhei was looking at her the way an indigent looks at a veal cutlet.

“Well,” I said, yawning myself. “Guess we better turn in.”

We’d pitched our tent just before dark, and it had blown down three times since. Now, as we made for the door, Shuhei became insistent. “No, no,” he said, all but blocking our way. “Stay in here tonight — with us.”

Grace looked up from her sake. “Yes,” she said. “We insist.”

I woke to the sound of whales. A deep, resonant huffing and groaning I could feel in my bones, a sound like trombones and English horns. It was light. I glanced round and saw that the Tsunamis were gone, hurriedly pulled on my clothes, grabbed my camera, and slipped out the door. There was no need to wake Stephanie.

The sky was overcast and the wind was still blowing a steady gale — it threw sand in my face as I made my way down to the cove where the Tsunamis kept their inflatable raft. There were birds everywhere — gulls whitening the sky, cormorants diving for fish, penguins loitering among the rocks as if they’d been carved of wood. Elephant seals and their pups sprawled on the beach; right whales spouted in the bay. It was like a National Geographic Special. I took a few shots of the seals, then worked my way down the shoreline until I found Grace and Melia perched atop a sand dune with a pair of binoculars and a notepad. Grace was wearing a windbreaker, white shorts, and a scarf; Melia was six years old.

Grace waved. “Want to go out in the boat?” she called.

I stood in water up to my knees, bracing the raft, while Grace pulled the starter cord and Melia held my Bronica. As we lurched off into the persistent swells I found myself thinking of Nick, Gary, and Ernie, but my initial fears proved unfounded: Grace was a faultless and assured pilot. We cut diagonally across the bay toward a distant sand spit. Gulls keened overhead, seals barked, spray flew, and then, before I could even get my camera focused, a big right pounded the water with his massive flukes, not thirty feet from us. “That was Bob Tail,” Grace said, laughing.

I was wiping the spray from my lens. “How could you tell?”

“Easy. There’s a piece missing from his left fluke.”

We cruised the bay, and I was introduced to thirty whales or so, some recognized by name, others anonymous. I saw Gray Spot, Cyclops, Farrah Fawcett, and Domino, and actually got close enough to touch one of them. He was skimming the surface, black as a barge and crusted over with barnacles and lice, the huge yellowed mesh of his baleen exposed like the insides of a piano. Grace wheeled the raft round on him, throttle cranked down to idle, and as we came up alongside him I reached out and patted his cool, smooth hide. It was like patting a very wet horse the size of a house. I laid my open palm against the immensity of the whale’s flank and for one mad moment thought I could feel the blood coursing through him, the colossal heart beating time with the roll of the tides and the crash of distant oceans; I felt I was reaching out and touching the great steaming heart of the planet itself. And then, in a rush of foam, he was gone.

For the next two weeks I spent mornings, afternoons — and when the light was good — evenings out on the bay. Stephanie came out with us once or twice, but preferred beachcombing with the girls; Shuhei was busy with the other boat, running up to Punta Tombo and back — something to do with his sonar dishes. He was gathering data on the above-water sounds of the right whale, while Grace was busy surveying the local population for size, color, distinguishing characteristics. She was also intent on observing their breeding behavior.

One afternoon we came upon a female floating belly up. Two males — one an adolescent no more than two-thirds her size — were nudging her, shoving at her great inert form with their callused snouts like a pair of beavers trying to maneuver a log. Grace cut the engine and pulled out her notepad. “Is she dead?” I asked.

Grace laughed. The sun was climbing, and she held up a hand to shade her eyes as she looked at me. “They’re mating,” she said. “Or about to.” “A ménage à trois?”

She explained it, patiently. The female was rejecting her suitors, heaving her working parts from the water to avoid being taken forcibly. The reason for the cold flipper was anybody’s guess. Perhaps she was tired, or suffering from a cold, or simply discriminating. She did have a problem, though. Since she couldn’t breathe while inverted, she’d have to right herself every fifteen minutes or so to take a quick breath. And then they’d be on her.

The first time she rolled over we recognized her as Domino, so named for the symmetrical arrangement of callosities on her forehead. She was an adept coquette: rolling, spouting, filling her lungs, and turning belly up again before her suitors had a chance. I made some sort of joke about the prom and the back seat of a Studebaker. Grace giggled, the raft bobbed, we had peanut butter sandwiches — and waited.

Grace told me about growing up over her father’s sushi bar in Little Tokyo, about dropping out of veterinary school to study oceanography at Miami, about Osaka and Shuhei. I told her about the crested tit and the capybara, and was in the middle of a devastatingly witty aperçu of the Junior Miss world when suddenly the raft was rammed from behind and tossed into the air like a bit of driftwood. A third male, big as an express train, had come charging past us in the heat of his passion, intent on Domino. We were shaken, but unhurt. The raft was right side up, the camera round my neck, the notepad in Grace’s lap.

Meanwhile, it became clear that the interloper was not about to stand on ceremony. He chased off his rivals, pounded the water to a froth with his tail, forced Domino over, and ravished her. It was frightening, appalling, fascinating — like nothing I’d ever imagined. They re-enacted the birth of Surtsey, the consolidation of the moon, the eruption of Vesuvius. He slid beneath her, belly to belly, locked his flippers in hers and pitched into her. Leviathan indeed.

I was swollen with emotion, transported, ticking with excitement. So awestruck I hadn’t taken a single photograph. Grace’s hand was on my knee. The raft rose and settled, rose and settled, as if keeping time with each monumental thrust and heave. Somehow — I have no clear recollection of how it happened — we were naked. And then we were on the floor of the raft, gently undulating rubber, the cries of gulls, salt sea spray, locked in a mystery and a rhythm that defied the drift of continents and the receding of the waters.

A month later, in New York, I ran into Harry Macey at a bar. “So what gives with Grace and Shuhei?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

I hadn’t heard? There’d been some sort of blowup between them. A vicious temper. Stormy. Hadn’t I noticed? Well, he’d really taken it to her: black eye, scratched cornea, right arm in a sling. She was in San Francisco with the children. He was in Miami, brooding. The project was dead.

Harry ground out his cigarette in the ashtray he held in his palm. “Did you notice any strain between them when you were down there?”

“None.”

He grinned. “Cabin fever, I guess, huh? I mean, I take it it’s pretty bleak down there.” He ordered me another drink. “So listen,” he said. “You interested in flying out to the Azores? There’s a big broil going on over that little local whaling operation — the Portuguese thing.”

I downed my drink in a gulp. I felt like a saboteur, a killer, the harpoonist crouched in the bow of the rushing boat. “If you want to know the truth,” I said, holding his eyes; “I’m just a little bit tired of whales right now.”

(1979)

A WOMEN’S RESTAURANT

I

It is a women’s restaurant. Men are not permitted. Women go there to be in the company of other women, to sit in the tasteful rooms beneath the ancient revolving fans and the cool green of spilling plants, to cross or uncross their legs as they like, to chat, sip liqueurs, eat. At the door, the first time they enter, they are asked to donate twenty-five cents and they are issued a lifetime membership card. Thus the women’s restaurant has the legal appearance of a private club, and its proprietors, Grace and Rubie, avoid running afoul of the antidiscrimination laws. A women’s restaurant. What goes on there, precisely, no man knows. I am a man. I am burning to find out.

This I do know: they drink wine. I have been out back, at night, walking my dog, and I have seen the discarded bottles: chablis, liebfraumilch, claret, mountain burgundy, Bristol Cream. They eat well too. The garbage is rich with dark exotic coffee grounds and spiced teas, the heads of sole, leaves of artichoke, shells of oyster. There is correspondence in the trash as well. Business things for the most part, but once there was a letter from Grace’s mother in Moscow, Iowa. Some of the women smoke cigars. Others — perhaps the same ones — drive motorcycles. I watched two of them stutter up on a Triumph 750. In leathers. They walked like meatpackers, heavy, shoulders back, hips tight. Up the steps of the front porch, through the curtained double doors, and in. The doors closed like eyes in mascara.

There is more. Grace, for instance. I know Grace. She is tall, six three or four I would guess, thin and slightly stooped, her shoulders rounded like a question mark. Midthirties. Not married. She walks her square-headed cat on a leash, an advocate of women’s rights. Rubie I have spoken with. If Grace is austere, a cactus tall and thorny, Rubie is lush, a spreading peony. She is a dancer. Five feet tall, ninety pounds, twenty-four years old. Facts. She told me one afternoon, months ago, in a bar. I was sitting at a table, alone, reading, a glass of beer sizzling in the sunlight through the window. Her arms and shoulders were bare, the thin straps of her dancer’s tights, blue jeans. She was twirling, on point, between groups of people, her laughter like a honky-tonk piano. She came up from behind, ran her finger along the length of my nose, called it elegant. Her own nose was a pug nose. We talked. She struck poses, spoke of her body and the rigors of dancing, showed me the hard muscle of her arms. The sun slanted through the high windows and lit her hair. She did not ask about my life, about the book I was reading, about how I make a living. She did not sit down. When she swept away in a series of glissades, her arms poised, I ordered another beer. She wouldn’t know me on the street.

The women’s restaurant fronts a street that must have been a main thoroughfare fifty years ago. It comprises the whole of an old mansion, newly painted and shuttered. There is a fence, a gate, a tree, a patch of lawn. Gargoyles. The mayor may once have lived there. On either side blocks of two-story brick buildings stretch to the street corners like ridges of glacial detritus. Apartments above, storefronts below: a used clothing store, an organic merchant, a candle shop. Across the street, incongruous, is a bar that features a picture window and topless dancers. From behind this window, washed in shadow, I reconnoiter the women’s restaurant.

I have watched women of every stripe pass through those curtained front doors: washerwomen, schoolmarms, gymnasts, waitresses, Avon ladies, Scout leaders, meter maids, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, spinsters, widows, dykes, gay divorcees, the fat, the lean, the wrinkled, the bald, the sagging, the firm, women in uniform, women in scarves and bib overalls, women in stockings, skirts, and furs, the towering Grace, the flowing Rubie, a nun, a girl with a plastic leg — and yes, even the topless dancers. There is something disturbing about this gathering of women, this classless convocation, this gynecomorphous melting pot. I think of Lysistrata, Gertrude Stein, Carry Nation.

My eyes and ears are open. Still, what I have come to know of Grace & Ruble’s is what any interested observer might know. I hunger for an initiate’s knowledge.

II

I have made my first attempt to crack the women’s restaurant.

The attempt was repulsed.

I was sitting at the picture window of the topless bar, chain-drinking tequila and tonic, watching the front porch of Grace & Rubie’s, the bloom of potted flowers, the promise of the curtained doors, and women, schools of them, electric with color, slamming car doors, dismounting from bicycles, motorcycles, trotting up the steps, in and out, tropical fish behind a spotted pane of glass. The sun was drifting toward the horizon, dipping behind the twin chimneys, spooning honey over the roof, the soft light blurring edges and corners, smoothing back the sneers of the gargoyles. It was then that I spotted Rubie. Her walk fluid and unperturbed as a drifting skater. There was another girl with her, an oriental girl. Black hair like a coat. I watched the door gape and then swallow them. Then I stood, put some money in my pocket, left some on the table, and stepped out into the street.

It was warm. The tree was budding. The sun had dropped a notch and the house flooded the street with shadow. I swam toward it, blood beating quick, stopped at the gate to look both ways, pushed through and mounted the steps. Then made my first mistake. I knocked. Knocked. Who knocks at the door of a restaurant? No one answered. I could hear music through the door. Electric jazz. I peered through the oval windows set in the door and saw that the curtains were very thick indeed. I felt uneasy. Knocked again.

After an interval Grace opened the door. Her expression was puzzled. “Yes?” she said.

I was looking beyond her, feeling the pulse of the music, aware of a certain indistinct movement in the background, concentrating on the colors, plants, polished woodwork. Underwater. Chagall.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, you can,” I said. “I’d like — ah — a cup of coffee for starters, and I’d like to see the menu. And your wine list.”

“I’m very sorry,” Grace said. “But this is a women’s restaurant.”

III

A women’s restaurant. The concept inflames me. There are times, at home, fish poached, pots scrubbed, my mind gone blank, when suddenly it begins to rise in my consciousness, a sunken log heaving to the surface. A women’s restaurant. The injustice of it, the snobbery, the savory dark mothering mystery: what do they do in there?

I picture them, Rubie, Grace, the oriental girl, the nun, the girl with one leg, all of them — picture them sipping, slouching, dandling sandals from their great toes (a mental peep beneath the skirts). I see them dropping the coils of their hair, unfastening their brassieres, rubbing the makeup from their faces. They are soft, heavy, glowing with muliebrity. The pregnant ones remove their tentish blouses, pinching shoes, slacks, underwear, and begin a slow primitive shuffle to the African beat of the drums and the cold moon music of the electric piano. The others watch, chanting, an arcane language, a formula, locked in a rhythm and a mystery that soar grinning above all things male, dark and fertile as the earth.

Or perhaps they’re shooting pool in the paneled back room, cigars smoking, brandy in snifters, eyes intense, their breasts pulled toward the earth, the slick cue sticks easing through the dark arches of their fingers, stuffed birds on the walls, the glossy balls clacking, riding down the black pockets like burrowing things darting for holes in the ground …

IV

Last night there was a fog, milk in an atomizer. The streets steamed. Turner, I thought. Fellini. Jack the Ripper. The dog led me to the fence outside the women’s restaurant, where he paused to sniff and balance on three legs. The house was a bank of shadow, dark in a negligee of moonlit mist. Fascinating, enigmatic, compelling as a white whale. Grace’s VW hunched at the curb behind me, the moon sat over the peaked roof cold as a stone, my finger was on the gate. The gate was latched. I walked on, then walked back. Tied the dog to one of the pickets, reached through to unlatch the gate, and stepped into the front yard at Grace & Rubie’s for the second time.

This time I did not knock.

Instead I slipped up to a window and peered through a crack in the curtains. It was black as the inside of a closet. On an impulse I tried the window. It was locked. At that moment a car turned into the street, tires chirping, engine revving, the headlights like hounds of heaven. Rubie’s Fiat.

I lost my head. Ran for the gate, tripped, scrambled back toward the house, frantic, ashamed, mortified. Trapped. The car hissed to a stop, the engine sang a hysterical chorus, the headlights died. I heard voices, the swat of car doors. Keys rattling. I crouched. Then crept into the shrubbery beneath the porch. Out by the fence the dog began to whimper.

Heels. Muffled voices. Then Rubie: “Aww, a puppy. And what’s he doing out here, huh?” This apparently addressed to the dog, whose whimpering cut a new octave. I could hear his tail slapping the fence. Then a man’s voice, impatient. The gate creaked, slapped shut. Footsteps came up the walk. Stopped at the porch. Rubie giggled. Then there was silence. My hand was bleeding. I was stretched out prone, staring at the ground. They were kissing. “Hey,” said Rubie, soft as fur, “I like your nose — did I tell you that?”

“How about letting me in tonight,” he whispered. “Just this once.” Silence again. The rustle of clothing. I could have reached out and shined their shoes. The dog whimpered.

“The poor pup,” Rubie breathed.

“Come on,” the guy said. I hated him.

And then, so low I could barely catch it, like a sleeping breath or the hum of a moth’s wing: “Okay.” Okay? I was outraged. This faceless cicisbeo, this panting lover, schmuck, male — this shithead was going to walk into Grace & Rubie’s just like that? A kiss and a promise? I wanted to shout out, call the police, stop this unthinkable sacrilege.

Rubie’s key turned in the lock. I could hear the shithead’s anticipatory breathing. A wave of disillusion deadened me. And then suddenly the porch light was blazing, bright as a cafeteria. I shrank. Grace’s voice was angry. “What is this?” she hissed. I held my breath.

“Look—” said Rubie.

“No men allowed,” said Grace. “None. Ever. Not now, not tomorrow — you know how I feel about this sort of thing.”

“—Look, I pay rent here too—”

I could hear the shithead shuffling his feet on the dry planks of the porch. Then Grace: “I’m sorry. You’ll have to leave.” In the shadows, the ground damp, my hand bleeding, I began to smile.

The door slammed. Someone had gone in. Then I heard Grace’s voice swelling to hurricane pitch, and Rubie raging back at her like a typhoon. Inside. Muffled by the double doors, oval windows, thick taffeta curtains. The shithead’s feet continued to shuffle on the porch. A moment ticked by, the voices storming inside, and then the light cut out. Dead. Black. Night.

My ears followed the solitary footsteps down the walk, through the gate and into the street.

V

I shadowed Rubie for eight blocks this morning. There were packages in her arms. Her walk was the walk of a slow-haunching beast. As she passed the dark windows of the shops she turned to watch her reflection, gliding, flashing in the sun, her bare arms, clogs, the tips of her painted toenails peeping from beneath the wide-bottomed jeans. Her hair loose, undulating across her back like a wheatfield in the wind. She stopped under the candy-striped pole outside Red’s Barber Shop.

I crossed the street, sat on a bench and opened a book. Then I saw Grace: slouching, wide-striding, awkward. Her sharp nose, the bulb of frizzed hair. She walked up to Rubie, unsmiling. They exchanged cheek-pecks and stepped into the barbershop.

When they emerged I dropped my book: Rubie was desecrated. Her head shaven, the wild lanks of hair hacked to stubble. Charlie Manson, I thought. Auschwitz. Nuns and neophytes. Grace was smiling. Rubie’s ears stuck out from her head, the color of butchered chicken. Her neck and temples were white as flour, blue-veined and vulnerable. I was appalled.

They walked quickly, stiffly, Rubie hurrying to match Grace’s long strides. Grace a sunflower, Rubie a stripped dandelion. I followed them to the women’s restaurant. Rubie did not turn to glance at her reflection in the shop windows.

VI

I have made my second attempt to crack the women’s restaurant. The attempt was repulsed.

This time I was not drunk: I was angry. Rubie’s desecration had been rankling me all day. While I could approve of Grace’s firmness with the faceless cicisbeo, I could not countenance her severity toward Rubie. She is like a stroke of winter, I thought, folding up Rubie’s petals, traumatizing her roots. An early frost, a blight. But then I am neither poet nor psychologist. My metaphors are primitive, my actions impulsive.

I kicked the gate open, stamped up the front steps, twisted the doorknob and stepped into the women’s restaurant. My intentions were not clear. I thought vaguely of rescuing Rubie, of entering that bastion of womanhood, of sex and mystery and rigor, and of walking out with her on my arm. But I was stunned. Frozen. Suddenly, and after all those weeks, I had done it. I was inside.

The entrance hall was narrow and dark, candlelit, overheated, the walls shaggy with fern and wandering Jew. Music throbbed like blood. I felt squeezed, pinched, confined, Buster Crabbe in the shrinking room. My heart left me. I was slouching. Ahead, at the far end of the hallway, a large room flowered in darkness and lights glowed red. Drum, drum, drum, the music like footsteps. That dim and deep central chamber drawing me: a women’s restaurant, a women’s restaurant: the phrase chanted in my head.

And then the door opened behind me. I turned. Two of the biker girls stepped through the doorway, crowding the hall. One of them was wearing a studded denim jacket, the collar turned up. Both were tall. Short-haired. Their shoulders congested the narrow hallway. I wheeled and started for the darkened room ahead. But stopped in midstride. Grace was there, a tray in her hand, her face looking freshly slapped. “You!” she hissed. The tray fell, glasses shattered, I was grabbed from behind. Rabbit-punched. One of the biker girls began emitting fierce gasping Ninja sounds as her white fists and sneakered feet lashed out at me. I went down, thought I saw Rubie standing behind Grace, a soft flush of alarm suffusing her cheeks. A rhythm developed. The biker girls kicked, I huddled. Then they had me by belt and collar, the door was flung open and they rocked me, one, two, three, the bum’s rush, down the front steps and onto the walk. The door slammed.

I lay there for a moment, hurting. Then I became aware of the clack of heels on the pavement. A woman was coming up the walk: skirt, stockings, platforms.

She hesitated when she saw me there. And then, a look of disgust creasing her makeup, she stepped over me as if she were stepping over a worm or a fat greasy slug washed up in a storm. Her perfume was devastating.

VII

I have been meditating on the essential differences between men and women, isolating distinguishing traits. The meditation began with points of dissimilarity. Women, I reasoned, do not have beards, while they do have breasts. And yet I have seen women with beards and men with breasts — in fact, I came to realize, all men have breasts. Nipples too. Ah, but women have long hair, I thought. Narrow shoulders, expansive hips. Five toes on each foot. Pairs of eyes, legs, arms, ears. But ditto men. They are soft, yielding, dainty, their sensibilities refined — they like shopping. I ran through all the stereotypes, dismissed them one after another. There was only one distinguishing sexual characteristic, I concluded. A hole. A hole as dark and strange, as fascinating and forbidding, as that interdicted entrance to Grace and Rubie’s. Birth and motherhood, I thought. The maw of mystery.

I have also been perusing a letter from Rubie, addressed to a person named Jack. The letter is a reconstruction of thirty-two fragments unearthed in the trash behind the women’s restaurant. “I miss you and I love you, Jack,” the letter said in part, “but I cannot continue seeing you. My responsibilities are here. Yes I remember the night on the beach, the night in the park, the night at the cabin, the night on the train, the night in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral — memories I will always cherish. But it’s over. I am here. A gulf separates us. I owe it to Grace. Take care of yourself and your knockout nose. Love, R.” The letter disturbs me. In the same way that the women’s restaurant disturbs me. Secrets, stifling secrets. I want admission to them all.

VIII

The girl in the department store asked me what size my wife took. I hesitated. “She’s a big one,” I said. “About the same size as me.” The girl helped me pick out a pink polyester pantsuit, matching brassiere, tall-girl panty hose. Before leaving the store I also visited the ladies’ shoe department and the cosmetic counter. At the cosmetic counter I read from a list: glosser, blusher, hi-lighter, eyeshadow (crème, cake and stick), mascara, eyeliner, translucent powder, nail polish (frosted pink), spike eyelashes, luscious tangerine lipstick, tweezers, a bottle of My Sin and the current issue of Be Beautiful. At the shoe department I asked for Queen Size.

IX

After two weeks of laying foundation, brushing on, rubbing in, tissuing off, my face was passable. Crude, yes — like the slick masks of the topless dancers — but passable nonetheless. And my hair, set in rollers and combed out in a shoulder-length flip, struck close on the heels of fashion. I was no beauty, but neither was I a dog.

I eased through the gate, sashayed up the walk, getting into the rhythm of it. Bracelets chimed at my wrists, rings shot light from my fingers. Up the steps, through the front door and into that claustrophobic hallway. My movement fluid, silky, the T-strap flats gliding under my feet like wind on water. I was onstage, opening night, and fired for the performance. But then I had a shock. One of the biker girls slouched at the end of the hallway lighting a cigar. I tossed my chin and strutted by. Our shoulders brushed. She grinned. “Hi,” she breathed. I stepped past her, and into the forbidden room.

It was dark. Candlelit. There were tables, booths, sofas and lounge chairs. Plants, hangings, carpets, woodwork. Women. I held back. Then felt a hand on my elbow. It was the biker. “Can I buy you a drink?” she said.

I shook my head, wondering what to do with my voice. Falsetto? A husky whisper?

“Come on,” she said. “Get loose. You’re new here, right? — you need somebody to show you around.” She pinched my elbow and ushered me to a booth across the room — wooden benches like church pews. I slid in, she eased down beside me. I could feel her thigh against mine. “Listen,” I said, opting for the husky whisper, “I’d really rather be alone—”

Suddenly Rubie was standing over us. “Would you like something?” she said.

The biker ordered a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. I wanted a beer, asked for a sunrise. “Menu?” said Rubie. She was wearing a leather apron, and she seemed slimmer, her shoulders rounded. Whipped, I thought. Her ears protruded and her brushcut bristled. She looked like a Cub Scout. An Oliver Twist.

“Please,” I said, huskily.

She looked at me. “Is this your first time?”

I nodded.

She dug something — a lavender card — from an apron pocket. “This is our membership card. It’s twenty-five cents for a lifetime membership. Shall I put it on the bill?”

I nodded. And followed her with my eyes as she padded off.

The biker turned to me. “Ann Jenks,” she said, holding out her hand.

I froze. A name, a name, a name. This part I hadn’t considered. I pretended to study the menu. The biker’s hand hung in the air. “Ann Jenks,” she repeated.

“Valerie,” I whispered, and nearly shook hands. Instead I held out two fingers, ladylike. She pinched them, rubbed her thumb over the knuckles and looked into my eyes.

Then Rubie appeared with our drinks. “Cheers,” said Ann Jenks. I downed the libation like honey and water.

An hour and a half later I was two sheets to the wind and getting cocky. Here I was, embosomed in the very nave, the very omphalos of furtive femininity — a prize patron of the women’s restaurant, a member, privy to its innermost secrets. I sipped at my drink, taking it all in. There they were — women — chewing, drinking, digesting, chatting, giggling, crossing and uncrossing their legs. Shoes off, feet up. Smoking cigarettes, flashing silverware, tapping time to the music. Women among women. I bathed in their soft chatter, birdsong, the laughter like falling coils of hair. I lit a cigarette, and grinned. No more fairybook-hero thoughts of rescuing Rubie — oh no, this was paradise.

Below the table, in the dark, Ann Jenks’s fingertips massaged my knee.

I studied her face as she talked (she was droning on about awakened consciousness, liberation from the mores of straight society, feminist terrorism). Her cheekbones were set high and cratered the cheeks below, the hair lay flat across her crown and rushed straight back over her ears, like duck’s wings. Her eyes were black, the mouth small and raw. I snubbed out the cigarette, slipped my hand under the jacket and squeezed her breast. Then I put my tongue in her mouth.

“Hey,” she said, “want to go?”

I asked her to get me one more drink. When she got up I slid out and looked for the restroom. It was a minor emergency: six tequila sunrises and a carafe of dinner wine tearing at my vitals. I fought an impulse to squeeze my organ.

There were plants everywhere. And behind the plants, women. I passed the oriental girl and two housewives/divorcées in a booth, a nun on a divan, a white-haired woman and her daughter. Then I spotted the one-legged girl, bump and grind, passing through a door adjacent to the kitchen. I followed.

The restroom was pink, carpeted: imitation marble countertops, floodlit mirrors, three stalls. Grace was emerging from the middle one as I stepped through the door. She smiled at me. I smiled back, sweetly, my bladder aflame. Then rushed into the stall, fought down the side zipper, tore at the silky panties, and forgot to sit down. I pissed, long and hard. Drunk. Studying the graffiti — women’s graffiti. I laughed, flushed, turned to leave. But there was a problem: a head suspended over the door to the stall. Angry eyes. The towering Grace.

I shrugged my shoulders and held out my palms. Grace’s face was the face of an Aztec executioner. This time there would be no quarter. I felt sick. And then suddenly my shoulder hit the door like a wrecker’s ball, Grace sat in the sink, and the one-legged girl began gibbering from the adjoining compartment. Out the door and into the kitchen, rushing down an aisle lined with ovens, the stink of cooking food, scraps, greased-over plates, a screen door at the far end, slipping in the T-straps, my brassiere working round, Grace’s murderous rasping shriek at my back, STOP HIM! STOP HIM! and Rubie, pixie Rubie, sack of garbage in her hand at the door.

Time stopped. I looked into Rubie’s eyes, imploring, my breath cut in gasps, five feet from her. She let the garbage fall. Then dropped her head and right shoulder, and hit my knees like a linebacker. I went down. My face in coffee grounds and eggshells. Rubie’s white white arms shackles on my legs and on my will.

X

I have penetrated the women’s restaurant, yes, but in actuality it was little more than a rape. There was no sympathy, I did not belong: why kid myself? True, I do have a lifetime membership card, and I was — for a few hours at any rate — an unexceptionable patron of the women’s restaurant. But that’s not enough. I am not satisfied. The obsession grows in me, pregnant, swelling, insatiable with the first taste of fulfillment. Before I am through I will drink it to satiety. I have plans.

Currently, however, I am unable to make bail. Criminal trespass (Rubie testified that I was there to rob them, which, in its way, is true, I suppose), and assault (Grace showed the bruises on her shins and voice box where the stall door had hit her). Probation I figure. A fine perhaps. Maybe even psychiatric evaluation.

The police have been uncooperative, antagonistic even. Malicious jokes, pranks, taunts, their sweating red faces fastened to the bars night and day. There has even been brutality. Oddly enough — perhaps as a reaction to their gibes — I have come to feel secure in these clothes. I was offered shirt, pants, socks, shoes, and I refused them. Of course, these things are getting somewhat gritty, my makeup is a fright, and my hair has lost its curl. And yet I defy them.

In drag. I like the sound of it. I like the feel. And, as I say, I have plans. The next time I walk through those curtained doors at Grace & Rubie’s there will be no dissimulation. I will stroll in and I will belong, an initiate, and I will sit back and absorb the mystery of it, feed on honeydew and drink the milk of paradise. There are surgeons who can assure it.

After all, it is a women’s restaurant.

(1976)

THAWING OUT

They were feet that he loved, feet that belonged in high heels, calfskin, furry slippers with button eyes and rabbit ears, and here they were, naked to the snow. He was hunched in his denim jacket, collar up, scarf wound tight round his throat, and his fingers were so numb he could barely get a cigarette lit. She stood beside him in her robe, barely shivering, the wild ivy of her hair gone white with a dusting of snow. He watched her lift her arms, watched her breasts rise gently as she fought back her hair and pulled the bathing cap tight to her skull. He took a quick drag on the cigarette and looked away.

There were maybe twenty cars in the lot: station wagons, Volvos, VW Bugs, big steel-blue Buicks with their crushproof bumpers and nautical vents. An inch of new snow softened the frozen ruts and the strips of yellowed ice that lay like sores beneath it. Beyond the lot, a short slope, the white rails of the dock, and the black lapping waters of the Hudson. It was five of two — he checked his watch — but the belly of the sky hung so low it might have been dusk.

A moment earlier, when Naina had stepped from her car, a chain reaction had begun, and now the car doors were flung open one by one and the others began to emerge. They were old, all of them, as far as he could see. A few middle-aged, maybe. Some in robes, some not. The men were ghosts in baggy trunks, bowlegged, splay-footed and bald, with fallen bellies and dead gray hair fringing their nipples. He thought of Buster Keaton, in his antiquated swimsuit and straw boater. The women were heavier, their excrescences forced like sausage stuffing into the black spandex casings of their one-piece suits. Their feet were bloated and red, their thighs mottled with disuse, their upper arms heavy, bulbous, the color of suet. They called out to one another gaily, like schoolgirls at a picnic, in accents thick with another time and place.

“Jesus, Naina,” he whispered, turning to her, “this is crazy. It’s like something out of Fellini. Look at them.”

Naina gave him a soft tight-lipped smile — a tolerant smile, understated, serene, a smile that stirred his groin and made him go weak with something like hunger — and then her mother’s car schussed into the lot. The whole group turned as one to watch as the ancient, rust-eaten Pontiac heaved over the ruts toward them. He could see the grin on Mama Vyshensky’s broad, faintly mustachioed face as she fought the wheel and rode the bumps. He froze for an instant, certain her final, veering skid would send her careening into the side of his Camaro, but the big splotched bumper jerked to a halt six feet short of him. “Naina!” she cried, lumbering from the car to embrace her daughter as if she hadn’t seen her in twenty years. “And Marty,” turning to envelop him in a quick bear hug. “Nice weather, no?”

The breath streamed from her nostrils. She was a big woman with dimples and irrepressible eyes, a dead ringer for Nina Khrushchev. Her feet — as swollen and red as any of the others’—were squeezed into a pair of cheap plastic thongs and she wore a tentlike swimsuit in a shade of yellow that made the Camaro look dull. “Sonia!” she shouted, turning away and flagging her hand. “Marfa!” A gabble of Ukrainian, and then the group began to gather.

Marty felt the wind on his exposed hand and he took a final drag on his cigarette, flicked the butt away, and plunged his hand deep in his pocket. This was really something. Crazy. He felt like a visitor to another planet. One old bird was rubbing snow into the hair of his bare chest, another skidding down the slope on his backside. “A toast!” someone shouted, and they all gathered round a bottle of Stolichnaya, thimble-sized glasses materializing in their hands. And when one old man with reddened ears asked him where his swim trunks were, Marty said it wasn’t cold enough for him, not by half.

They drank. One round, then another, and then they shouted something he didn’t catch and flung the glasses over their shoulders. Two ponderous old women began fighting playfully over a towel while Naina’s mother shouted encouragement and the others laughed like wizened children. And Naina? Naina stood out among them like a virgin queen, the youngest by thirty years. At least. That’s what it was, he suddenly realized — an ancient rite, sacrifice of the virgin. But they were a little late in this case, he thought, and felt his groin stir again. He squeezed her hand, gazed off into the curtain of falling snow, and saw the mountains fade and reappear in the distance.

Then he heard the first splash and turned to see a flushed bald head bobbing in the water and the old man with reddened ears suspended in the air, knees clutched tightly to his chest. There was a second splash — a real wallop — and then another, and then they were all in, frolicking like seals. Naina was one of the last to go, tucking her chin, planting her feet, her thighs flexing as she floated out into the tumult of the storm and cut the flat black surface in perfect grace and harmony.

The whole thing left him cold.

They’d been going together a month when she first took him to meet her mother. It was mid-October, chilly, a persistent rain beating the leaves from the trees. He didn’t want to meet her mother. He wanted to stay in bed and touch every part of her. He was twenty-three and he’d had enough of mothers.

“Don’t expect anything fancy,” Naina said, sitting close as he drove. “It’s the house I grew up in. Mama’s no housekeeper.”

He glanced at her, her face as open as a doll’s, high forehead, thick eyebrows, eyes pale as ice, and that hair. That’s what caught him the first time he saw her. That and her voice, as hushed and placid as the voice talking inside his head. “How long do we have to stay?” he said.

The house was in Cold Spring, two stories, white with green trim, in need of paint. It was an old house, raked back from the steep hill that dropped through town to the foot of the river. Naina’s mother was waiting for them at the door. “This is Marty,” she pronounced, as if he could have been anyone else, and to his horror, she embraced him. “In,” she said, “in,” sweeping them before her and slamming the door with a boom. “Such nasty day.”

Inside, it was close and hot, the air heavy with the odor of cooking. He was no gourmet, and he couldn’t identify the aroma, but it brought him back to high school and the fat-armed women who stood guard over the big simmering pots in the cafeteria. It wasn’t a good sign.

“Sit,” said Naina’s mother, gesturing toward a swaybacked sofa draped with an afghan and three overfed cats. “Shoo,” she said, addressing the cats, and he sat. He looked around him. There were doilies everywhere, lamps with stained shades, mounds of newspapers and magazines. On the wall above the radiator, the framed portrait of a blue-eyed Christ.

Naina sat beside him while her mother trundled back and forth, rearranging the furniture, fussing with things, and all the while watching him out of the corner of her eye. He was sleeping with her daughter, and she knew it. “A peppermint,” she said, whirling round on him with a box the size of a photo album, “maybe you want? Beer maybe? A nice glass of buttermilk?”

He didn’t want anything. “No thanks,” he managed, the voice stuck in his throat. Naina took a peppermint.

Finally the old woman settled into the sofa beside him — beside him, when there were six other chairs in the room — and he felt himself sinking into the cushions as into a morass. Something was boiling over in the kitchen: he could smell it, hear it hissing. Sitting, she towered over him. “You like my Naina?” she asked.

The question stunned him. She’d tossed him a medicine ball and he was too weak to toss it back. Like? Did he like her Naina? He lingered over her for hours at a time, hours that became days, and he did things to her in the dark and with the lights on too. Did he like her? He wanted to jump through the roof.

“You call me Mama,” she said, patting his hand. “None of this Mrs. business.” She was peering into his eyes like an ophthalmologist. “So. You like her?” she repeated.

Miserable, squirming, glancing at Naina — that smile, tight-lipped and serene, her eyes dancing — and then back to her mother, he couldn’t seem to find anything to focus on but his shoes. “Yeah,” he whispered.

“Um,” the old woman grunted, narrowing her eyes as if she were deciding something. Then she rose heavily to her feet, and as he looked up in surprise and mortification, she spread her arms above him in a grand gesture. “All this,” she said, “one days is yours.”

“So what do you mean, like love and marriage and all that crap?”

Marty was staring down into his Harvey Wallbanger. It was November. Naina was at art class and he was sitting in the bar of the Bum Steer, talking about her. With Terry. Terry was just back from San Francisco and he was wearing a cowboy hat and an earring. “No,” Marty protested, “I mean she’s hot, that’s all. And she’s a great person. You’re going to like her. Really. She’s—”

“What’s her mother look like?”

Mama Vyshensky rose up before his eyes, her face dark with a five o’clock shadow, her legs like pylons, the square of her shoulders and the drift of her collapsed bosom. “What do you mean?”

Terry was drinking a mug of beer with a shot of tomato juice on the side. He took a swallow of beer, then upended the tomato juice in the mug. The stain spread like blood. “I mean, they all wind up looking like their mother. And they all want something from you.” Terry stirred the tomato beer with his forefinger and then sucked it thoughtfully. “Before you know it you got six slobbering kids, a little pink house, and you’re married to her mother.”

The thought of it made him sick. “Not me,” he said. “No way.”.

Terry tilted the hat back on his head and fiddled briefly with the earring. “You living together yet?”

Marty felt his face flush. He lifted his drink and put it down again. “We talked about it,” he said finally, “like why pay rent on two places, you know? She’s living in an apartment in Yorktown and I’m still in the bungalow. But I don’t know.”

Terry was grinning at him. He leaned over and gave him a cuff on the shoulder. “You’re gone, man,” he said. “It’s all over. Birdies singing in the trees.”

Marty shrugged. He was fighting back a grin. He wanted to talk about her — he was full of her — but he was toeing a fine line here. He and Terry were both men of the world, and men of the world didn’t moon over their women. “There’s one rule,” he said, “they’ve got to love you first. And most. Right?”

“Amen,” Terry said.

They were quiet a moment, mulling over this nugget of wisdom. Marty drained his glass and ordered another. “What the hell,” Terry said, “give me another one too.”

The drinks came. They sipped meditatively. “Shit,” Terry said, “you know what? I saw your mother. At La Guardia. It was weird. I mean I’m coming in after six months out there and I get off the plane and there’s your mother.”

“Who was she with?”

“I don’t know. Some skinny old white-haired dude with a string tie and a suit. She said hello to me and I shook the guy’s hand. They were going to Bermuda, I think she said.”

Marty said nothing. He sipped at his drink. “She’s a bitch,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” Terry said, reprising the ceremony of the beer and the tomato juice, “whatever. But listen,” turning to him now, his face lit beneath the brim of his ten-gallon hat, “let me tell you about San Francisco — I mean that’s where it’s really happening.”

In January, a month after he’d watched her part the frigid waters of the Hudson, the subject of living arrangements came up again. She’d cooked for him, a tomato-and-noodle dish she called spaghetti but that was pure Kiev in flavor, texture, and appearance — which is not to say it was bad, just that it wasn’t spaghetti as he knew it. He had three helpings, then he built a fire and they lay on the sofa together. “You know, this is crazy,” she said in her softest voice, the one with the slight catch to it.

It had been a long day — he was in his first year of teaching, Special Ed, and the kids had been wild. They’d sawed the oak handles off the tools in shop class and chucked stones at the schoolbus during lunch break. He was drowsy. “Hm?” was all the response he could manage.

Her voice purred in his ear. “Spending all my time here; I mean, half my clothes here and half at my place. It’s crazy.”

He said nothing, but his eyes were open.

She was silent too. A log shifted in the fireplace. “It’s just such a waste, is all,” she said finally. “The rent alone, not to mention gas and wear and tear on my car …”

He got up to poke the fire, his back to her. “Terry’s going back to the West Coast this summer. He wants me to go along. For a vacation. I mean, I’ve never seen it.”

“So what does that mean?” she said.

He poked the fire.

“You know I can’t go,” she said after a moment. “I’ve got courses to take at New Paltz. You know that, right?”

He felt guilty. He looked guilty. He shrugged.

Later, he made Irish coffee, heavy on sugar, cream, and whiskey. She was curled up in the corner of the sofa, her legs bare, feet tucked under her. She was spending the night.

The wind had come up and sleet began to rattle the windows. He brought the coffee to her, sat beside her and took her hand. It was then that the picture of her perched at the edge of the snowy dock came back to him. “Tell me again,” he said, “about the water, how it felt.”

“Hm?”

“You know, with the Polar Bear Club?”

He watched her slow smile, watched the snowy afternoon seep back into her eyes. “Oh, that — I’ve been doing it since I was three. It’s nothing. I don’t even think about it.” She looked past him, staring into the flames. “You won’t believe this, but it’s not that cold — almost the opposite.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I won’t.”

“No, really,” she insisted, looking him full in the face now. She paused, shrugged, took a sip of her coffee. “It depends on your frame of mind, I guess.”

At the end of June, just before he left for San Francisco, they took a trip together. He’d heard about a fishing camp in northern Quebec, a place called Chibougamau, where pike and walleye attacked you in the boat. There were Eskimos there, or near there, anyway. And the last four hours of driving was on dirt roads.

She had no affection for pike, or walleye either, but this was their vacation, their last chance to be together for a while. She smiled her quiet smile and packed her bag. They spent one night in Montreal and then drove the rest of the way the following day. When they got there — low hills, a scattering of crude cabins, and a river as raw and hard as metal — Marty was so excited his hands trembled on the wheel. “I want to fish,” he said to the guide who greeted them.

The guide was in his forties, hard-looking, with a scar that ran in a white ridge from his ear to his Adam’s apple. He was dressed in rubber knee boots, jeans, and a lumberjack shirt. “Hi” and “thank you” was about all the English he could manage. He gestured toward the near cabin.

“Ours?” Marty said, pointing first to Naina and then himself.

The guide nodded.

Marty looked up at the sun; it squatted on the horizon, bloated and misshapen.

“Listen, Naina,” he said, “honey, would you mind if … I mean, I’m dying to wet my line and since we’re paying for today and all—”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll unpack. Have fun.” She grinned at the guide. The guide grinned back.

A moment later, Marty was out on the river, experimentally manning the oars while the guide stood in the bow, discoursing on technique. Marty tried to listen, but French had never been his strong suit; in the next instant the guide cast a lure ahead of them and immediately connected with a fish that bent the rod double. Marty pulled at the oars, and the guide, fighting his fish, said something over his shoulder. This time, though, the guide’s face was alive with urgency and the something came in an angry rush, as if he were cursing. Pull harder? Marty thought. Is that what he wants?

He dug in a bit harder, his eyes on the line and the distant explosion where the fish — it was a walleye — cut the surface. But now the guide was raving at him, nonstop, harsh and guttural, and all the while looking desperately from Marty to the bent rod and back again. Marty looked round him. The river was loud as a freight train. “What?” he shouted. “What’s the matter?” And then all at once, his eyes wild, the guide heaved the pole into the water, knocked Marty aside, and took up the oars in a frenzy. Then Marty saw it, the precipice yawning before them, the crash and flow of the water, spray in his face, the shore looming up, and the guide snatching frantically at the brush shooting past them. With ten feet to spare, the guide caught a low-hanging branch, the boat jerked back, and all of a sudden Marty was in the water.

But what water! The shock of it beat the breath from him and he went under. He grasped at the air and then he was swept over the falls like a bit of fluff, pounded on the rocks, and flung ashore with the flotsam below. He was lucky. Nothing broken. The guide, muttering under his breath and shooting him murderous looks, sewed up the gash in his thumb with fishing line while Marty gritted his teeth and drank off a glass of whiskey like the wounded sheriff in an old western. It took him two hours to stop shivering.

In bed that night they heard the howling of wolves, a sound that opened up the darkness like a surgeon’s blade. “It was a communication problem,” Marty insisted, “that’s all.” Naina pressed her lips to his bruises, kneaded his back, nursed him with a sad, tender, tireless grace.

He woke at dawn, aching. She lay stiff beside him, her eyes open wide. “Will you miss me?” she said.

At first, he’d written her every day — postcards, mainly — from Des Moines, Albuquerque, the Grand Canyon. But then he got to San Francisco, found a job bartending, and drifted into another life. For a while he and Terry stayed with a girl Terry knew from his last trip, then they found a room for sixty dollars a week in a tenement off Geary, but Terry got mugged one night and the two of them moved in with a cocktail waitress Marty knew from work. Things were loose. He stopped writing. And when September came around, he didn’t write to the principal at school either.

December was half gone by the time he got back.

The Camaro had broken down on him just outside Chicago — a burnt valve — and the repairs ate up everything he had. He slept in the bus station for three nights while a Pakistani with mad black eyes worked over his car, and if it wasn’t for the hitchhiker who split the cost of gas with him, he’d still be there. When he finally coasted into Yorktown and pulled up at the curb outside Naina’s apartment, he was running on empty. For a long while, he stood there in the street looking up at her window. It had been a joyless trip back and he’d thought of her the whole way — her mouth, her eyes, the long tapering miracle of her body, especially her body — and twice he’d stopped to send her a card. Both times he changed his mind. Better to see her, try to explain himself. But now that he was here, outside her apartment, his courage failed him.

He stood there in the cold for fifteen minutes, then started up the driveway. There was ice on the steps and he lost his footing and fell against the door with a thump that shook the frame. Then he rang the bell and listened to the crashing in his chest. A stranger came to the door, a big fat-faced woman of thirty with a baby in her arms. No, Naina didn’t live there anymore. She’d left in September. No, she didn’t know where she was.

He sat in the car and tried to collect himself. Her mother’s, he thought, she’s probably at her mother’s. He patted down his pockets and counted the money. Two dollars and sixty-seven cents. A dollar for gas, a pack of cigarettes, and two phone calls.

He called his landlord first. Mr. Weiner answered the phone himself, his breathing ravaged with emphysema. He was sorry, Mr. Weiner was, but when he hadn’t heard from him he’d gone ahead and rented the place to someone else. His things were in the basement — and if he didn’t pick them up within the week he’d have to put them out for the trash, was that understood?

The other call was to his mother. She sounded surprised to hear from him — surprised and defensive. But had he heard? Yes, she was remarried. And no, she didn’t think Roger would like it if he spent the night. It was a real shame about his teaching job, but then he always was irresponsible. She punctuated each phrase with a sigh, as if the very act of speaking were torture. All right, she sighed finally, she’d loan him a hundred dollars till he got back on his feet.

It was getting dark when he pulled up in front of the house in Cold Spring. He didn’t hesitate this time — he was too miserable. Get it over with, he told himself, one way or the other.

Naina’s mother answered the door, peering myopically into the cold fading light. He could smell cabbage, cat, and vinegar, felt the warmth wafting out to him. “Marty?” she said.

He’d grown his hair long and the clipped mustache had become a patchy beard. His denim jacket was faded and it was torn across the shoulder where he’d fallen flat one afternoon in Golden Gate Park, laughing at the sky and the mescaline percolating inside his brain. He wore an earring like Terry’s. He wondered that she recognized him, and somehow it made him feel sorrowful — sorrowful and guilty. “Yes,” he said.

There was no embrace. She didn’t usher him in the door. She just stood there, the support hose sagging round her ankles.

“I, uh … I was looking for Naina,” he said, and then, attempting a smile, “I’m back.”

The old woman’s face was heavy, stern, hung with folds and pouches. She didn’t respond. But she was watching him in her shrewd way, totting up the changes, deciding something. “All right,” she said finally, “come,” and she swung back the door for him.

Inside, it was as he remembered it, nothing changed but for an incremental swelling of the heaps of magazines in the corners. She gestured for him to sit on the swaybacked sofa and took the chair across from him. A cat sprang into his lap. It was so quiet he could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock. “So, is she,” he faltered, “is she living here now? — I mean, I went out to Yorktown first thing….”

Mama Vyshensky slowly shook her head. “College,” she said. She shrugged her big shoulders and looked away, busying herself with the arrangement of the doily on the chair arm. “When she doesn’t hear from you, she goes back to college. For the Master.”

He didn’t know what to say. She was accusing him, he knew it. And he had no defense. “I’m sorry,” he said. He stood to go.

The old woman was studying him carefully, her chin propped on one hand, eyes reduced to slits. “Your house,” she said, “the bungalow. Where do you sleep tonight?”

He didn’t answer. He was going to sleep in the car, in a rubble of crumpled newspaper and fast-food containers, the greasy sleeping bag pulled up over his head.

“I have a cot,” she said. “In the closet.”

“I was going to go over to my mother’s….” he said, trailing off. He couldn’t seem to keep his right foot still, the heel tapping nervously at the worn floorboards. “Sit,” she said.

He did as he was told. She brought him a cup of hot tea, a bowl of boiled cabbage and ham, and a plate of cold pirogen. Eating, he tried to explain himself. “About Naina,” he began, “I—”

She waved her hand in dismissal. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I’m not the one you should tell.”

He set the cup down and looked at her — really looked at her — for the first time.

“Day after tomorrow,” she said, “the solstice, shortest day of year. You come to dock on river.” She held his eyes and he thought of the day she’d offered him the whole shabby pile of the house as if it were Hyde Park itself. “Same time as last year,” she said.

The day was raw, cold, the wind gusting off the river. A dead crust of snow clung to the ground, used up and discolored, dirt showing through in streaks that were like wounds. Marty got there early. He pulled into the lot and parked the Camaro behind a Lincoln the size of a Rose Parade float. He didn’t want her to see him right away. He let the car run, heater going full, and lit a cigarette. For a while he listened to the radio, but that didn’t feel right, so he flicked it off.

The lot gradually filled. He recognized some of the cars from the previous year, watched the white-haired old masochists maneuver over the ruts as if they were bringing 747s in for a landing. Mama Vyshensky was late, as usual, and no one made a move till her battered Pontiac turned the corner and jolted into the lot. Then the doors began to open and bare feet gripped the snow.

Still, he waited. The driver’s door of the Pontiac swung open, and then the passenger’s door, and he felt something rising in him, a metallic compound of hope and despair that stuck in the back of his throat. And then Naina stepped out of the car. Her back was to him, her legs long and naked, a flash of her blood-red nails against the tarnished snow. He watched her toss her head and then gather her hair in a tight knot and force it under the bathing cap. He’d slept in the car the past two nights, he’d hunkered over cups of coffee at McDonald’s like a bum. He saw her and he felt weak.

The crowd began to gather around Mama Vyshensky, ancient, all of them, spindly-legged, their robes like shrouds. He recognized the old man with red ears, bent double now and hunched over a cane. And a woman he’d seen last year, heaving along in a one-piece with a ballerina fringe round the hips. They drank a toast and shouted. Then another, and they flung their glasses. Naina stood silent among them.

He waited till they began to move down the slope to the dock and then he stepped noiselessly from the car, heart pounding in his chest. By the time they’d reached the dock, Naina and her mother at the head of the group, he was already passing the stragglers. “You bring a towel?” one old woman called out to him, and another tittered. He just gave her a blank stare, hurrying now, his eyes on Naina.

As he stepped onto the dock, Naina stood poised at the far end. She dropped her robe. Then she turned and saw him. She saw him — he could read it in her eyes — though she turned away as if she hadn’t. He tried to get to her, wedging himself between two heavy-breasted women and a hearty-looking old man with a white goatee, but the dock was too crowded. And then came the first splash. Naina glanced back at him and the soft smile seemed to flicker across her lips. She held his eyes now, held them across the field of drooping flesh, the body hair, the toothless mouths. Then she turned and dove.

All right, he thought, his pulse racing, all right. And then he had a boot in his hand and he was hopping on one leg. Then the other boot. A confusion of splashes caromed around him, water flew, the wind cut across the dock. He tore off his jacket, sweater, T-shirt, dropped his faded jeans, and stood there in his briefs, scanning the black rollicking water. There she was, her head bobbing gently, arms flowing across her breast in an easy tread.

He never hesitated. His feet pounded against the rough planks of the dock, the wind caught his hair, and he was up and out over the churning water, hanging suspended for the briefest, maddest, most lucid instant of his life, and then he was in.

Funny. It was warm as a bath.

(1988)

BACK IN THE EOCENE

Abscissa, ordinate, isosceles, Carboniferous, Mesozoic, holothurian: the terms come to him in a rush of disinterred syllables, a forgotten language conjured by the sudden sharp smell of chalk dust and blackboards. It happens every time. All he has to do is glance at the bicycle rack out front or the flag snapping crisply atop the gleaming aluminum pole, and the memories begin to wash over him, a typhoon of faces and places and names, Ilona Sharrow and Richie Davidson, Manifest Destiny, Heddy Grieves, the Sea of Tranquillity and the three longest rivers in Russia. He takes his daughter’s hand and shuffles toward the glowing auditorium, already choked up.

Inside, it’s worse. There, under the pale yellow gaze of the overhead lights, recognition cuts at him like a knife. It’s invested in the feel of the hard steel frames and cushionless planks of the seats, in the crackling PA system and the sad array of frosted cupcakes and chocolate-chip cookies presided over by a puffy matron from the PTA. And the smells — Pine Sol, floor wax, festering underarms and erupting feet, a faint lingering whiff of meat loaf and wax beans. Wax beans: he hasn’t had a wax bean, hasn’t inserted a wax bean in his mouth, in what — twenty years? The thought overwhelms him and he stands there awkwardly a moment, just inside the door, and then there’s a tug at his hand and his daughter slips away, flitting through the crowd like a bird to chase after her friends. He finds a seat in back.

The big stark institutional clock shows five minutes of eight. Settling into the unforgiving grip of the chair, he concentrates on the faces of his fellow parents, vaguely familiar from previous incarnations, as they trudge up and down the aisles like automatons. Voices buzz round him in an expectant drone. High heels click on the linoleum. Chairs scrape. He’s dreaming a scene from another auditorium an ice age ago, detention hall, the soporific text, shouts from beyond the windows and a sharp sweet taste of spring on the air, when Officer Rudman steps up to the microphone.

A hush falls over the auditorium, the gale of chatter dropping off to a breeze, a stir in the rafters, nothing. His daughter, ten years old and beautiful, her feet too big and her shoulders slumped, strides up the aisle and drops into the chair beside him as if her legs have been shot out from under her. “Dad,” she whispers, “that’s Officer Rudman.”

He nods. Who else would it be, up there in his spit and polish, his close-cropped hair and custom-fit uniform? Who else, with his sunny smile and weight lifter’s torso? Who else but Officer Rudman, coordinator of the school’s antidrug program and heartthrob of all the fifth-grade girls?

A woman with frosted hair and remodeled hips ducks in late and settles noiselessly into the chair in front of him. “Good evening,” Officer Rudman says, “I’m Officer Rudman,” Someone coughs. Feedback hisses through the speakers.

In the next moment they’re rising clumsily in a cacophony of rustling, stamping and nose blowing, as Officer Rudman leads them in the Pledge of Allegiance. Hands over hearts, a murmur of half-remembered words. He’s conscious of his daughter’s voice beside him, and of his own, and he shifts his eyes to steal a glimpse of her. Her face is serene, shining, hopeful, a recapitulation and refinement of her mother’s, and suddenly it’s too much for him and he has to look down at his feet: “… with liberty and-justice for all.” More coughing. The seats creak. They sit.

Officer Rudman gives the crowd a good long look, and then he begins. “Drugs are dangerous,” he says, “we all know that,” and he pauses while the principal, a thick-ankled woman with feathered hair and a dogged expression, translates in her halting Spanish: “Las drogas son peligrosas.” The man sits there in back, his daughter at his side, tasting wax beans, rushing with weltschmerz and nostalgia.

Eocene: designating or of the earliest epoch of the Tertiary Period in the Cenozoic Era, during which mammals became the dominant animals.

Je romps; tu romps; il rompe; nous rompons; vous rompez; ils rompent.

They didn’t have drugs when he was in elementary school, didn’t have crack and crank, didn’t have ice and heroin and AIDS to go with it. Not in elementary school. Not in the fifties. They didn’t even have pot.

Mary Jane, that’s what they called it in the high school health films, but no one ever called it that. Not on this planet, anyway. It was pot, pure and simple, and he smoked it, like anyone else. He’s remembering his first joint, age seventeen, a walkup on Broome Street, holes in the walls, bottles, rats, padlocks on the doors, one puff and you’re hooked, when Officer Rudman beckons a skinny dark-haired kid to the microphone. Big adult hands choke the neck of the stand and the mike drops a foot. Stretching till his ankles rise up out of his high-tops, the kid clutches at the microphone and recites his pledge to stay off drugs in a piping timbreless voice. “My name is Steven Taylor and I have good feelings of self-esteem about myself,” he says, his superamplified breathing whistling through the interstices, “and I pledge never to take drugs or to put anything bad in my body. If somebody asks me if I want drugs I will just say no, turn my back, change the subject, walk away or just say no.”

Brain-washing, that’s what Linda called it when he phoned to break their date for tonight. Easy for her to say, but then she didn’t have a daughter, didn’t know, couldn’t imagine what it was like to feel the net expand beneath you, high out over that chasm of crashing rock. What good did it do you? she said. Or me? She had a point. Hash, kif, LSD, cocaine, heroin. He’d heard all the warnings, watched all the movies, but how could you take anyone’s word for it? Was it possible, even? He’d sat through driver’s ed, sobering statistics, scare films and all, and then taken his mother’s Ford out on the highway and burned the tires off it. Scotch, gin, whiskey, Boone’s Farm, Night Train, Colt 45, Seconal, Tuinal, Quaalude. He’d heard all the warnings, yes, but when the time came he stuck the needle in his arm and drew back the plunger to watch the clear solution flush with his own smoldering blood. You remember to take your vitamins today?

“My name is Lucy Fadel and I pledge never to abuse drugs, alcohol or tobacco because I like myself and the world and my school and I can get high from just life.”

“My name is Roberto Campos and I don’t want to die from drugs. Peer pressure is what makes kids use drugs and I will just say no, I will walk away and I will change the subject.”

“Voy a decir no—”

Officer Rudman adjusts the microphone, clasps his hands in front of him. The parents lean forward. He holds their eyes. “You’ve all just heard the fifth graders’ pledges,” he says, “and these kids mean it. I’m proud of them. Let’s have a big hand for these kids.”

And there it is, thunderous, all those parents in their suits and sportcoats and skirts, wearing sober, earnest, angry looks, pounding their hands together in relief, as if that could do it, as if the force of their acclamation could drive the gangs from the streets or nullify that infinitely seductive question to which “No” is never the answer. He claps along with them, not daring to glance down at his daughter, picturing the first boy, the skinny dark one, up against the wall with the handcuffs on him, dead in the street, wasting away in some charity ward. And the girl, mother of four, twice divorced, strung out on martinis and diet pills and wielding the Jeep Cherokee like a weapon. That’s what it came down to: that’s what the warnings meant. Agon, agape, Ulysses S. Grant, parthenogenesis, the Monitor and the Merrimack, yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. His daughter takes his hand. “Now there’s a movie,” she whispers.

What happened to finger painting, hearts for Valentine’s Day and bunnies for Easter? Fifth grade, for Christ’s sake. Where was Treasure Island, Little Women, Lassie, Come Home? What had happened? Who was responsible? Where did it go wrong?

He’s on the verge of raising his hand and demanding an answer of Officer Rudman, the nostalgia gone sour in his throat now, but the lights dim and the film begins. A flicker of movement on the screen, bars, a jail cell. He watches a junkie writhe and scream, a demonic sunken-eyed man beating his head against a wall, someone, somewhere, lights flashing, police, handcuffs, more screams. Smoke a joint and you’re hooked: how they’d laughed over that one, he and Tony Gaetti, and laughed again to realize it was true, cooking the dope in a bottle cap, stealing disposable syringes, getting off in the rest room on the train and feeling they’d snowed the world. Things were different then. That was a long time ago.

Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Homo erectus: his daughter’s hand is crushing him, prim and cool, lying across his palm like a demolished building, a cement truck, glacial moraine. Up on the screen, the junkies are gone, replaced by a sunny schoolyard and a clone of Officer Rudman, statistics now, grim but hopeful. Inspiring music, smiling faces, kids who Just Say No.

When it’s over, he feels dazed, the lights flashing back on to transfix him like some animal startled along a darkened highway. All he wants is to be out of here, no more questions, no more tricks of memory, no more Officer Rudman or the vapid stares of his fellow parents. “Honey,” he whispers, bringing his face down close to his daughter’s, “we’ve got to go.” Officer Rudman’s chin is cocked back, his arms folded across his chest. “Any questions?” he asks.

“But Dad, the cake sale.”

The cake sale.

“We’ll have to miss it this time,” he whispers, and suddenly he’s on his feet, slumping his shoulders in the way people do when they duck out of meetings early or come late to the concert or theater, a gesture of submission and apology. His daughter hangs back — she wants to stay, wants cake, wants to see her friends — but he tugs at her hand and then they’re fighting their way through the gauntlet of concerned parents at the door and out into the night. “Dad!” she cries, tugging back at him, and only then does he realize he’s hurting her, clutching her hand like a lifeline in a swirl of darkening waters.

“I mean, have a cow, why don’t you?” she says, and he drops her hand.

“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

The flag is motionless, hanging limp now against the pole. He gazes up at the stars fixed in their tracks, cold and distant, and then the gravel crunches underfoot and they’re in the parking lot. “I just wanted a piece of cake,” his daughter says.

In the car, on the way home to her mother’s house, she stares moodily out the window to let him feel the weight of her disappointment, but she can’t sustain it. Before long she’s chattering away about Officer Rudman and Officer Torres, who sometimes helps with the program, telling him how nice they are and how corrupt the world is. “We have gangs here,” she says, “did you know that? Right here in our neighborhood.”

He gazes out on half-million-dollar homes. Stone and stucco, mailboxes out front, basketball hoops over garage doors. The streets are deserted. He sees no gangs. “Here?”

“Uh-huh. Chrissie Mueller saw two guys in Raiders hats at the 7-Eleven the other day—”

“Maybe they were buying Ho-Ho’s, maybe they just wanted a piece of cake.”

“Come on, Dad,” she says, but her tone tells him all is forgiven.

Her mother’s house is lighted like an arena, porch light, security lights, even the windows poking bright gleaming holes in the fabric of the night. He leans over to kiss his daughter good night, the car vibrating beneath him.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to, you know, ask you: did you ever use drugs? Or Mom?”

The question catches him by surprise. He looks beyond her, looks at that glowing bright house a moment, curtains open wide, the wash of light on the lawn. Abstersion, epopt, Eleusinian, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

“No,” he says finally. “No.”

(1990)

SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD

People would ask her what it was like. She’d watch them from her tower as they weaved along the trail in their baseball caps and day packs, their shorts, hiking boots and sneakers. The brave ones would mount the hundred and fifty wooden steps hammered into the face of the mountain to stand at the high-flown railing of the little glass-walled shack she called home for seven months a year. Sweating, sucking at canteens and bota bags, heaving for breath in the undernourished air, they would ask her what it was like. “Beautiful,” she would say. “Peaceful.”

But that didn’t begin to express it. It was like floating untethered, drifting with the clouds, like being cupped in the hands of God. Nine thousand feet up, she could see the distant hazy rim of the world, she could see Mount Whitney rising up above the crenellations of the Sierra, she could see stars that haven’t been discovered yet. In the morning, she was the first to watch the sun emerge from the hills to the east, and in the evening, when it was dark beneath her, the valleys and ridges gripped by the insinuating fingers of the night, she was the last to see it set. There was the wind in the trees, the murmur of the infinite needles soughing in the uncountable branches of the pines, sequoias and cedars that stretched out below her like a carpet. There was daybreak. There was the stillness of 3:00 A.M. She couldn’t explain it. She was sitting on top of the world.

Don’t you get lonely up here? they’d ask. Don’t you get a little stir-crazy?

And how to explain that? Yes, she did, of course she did, but it didn’t matter. Todd was up here with her in the summer, one week on, one week off, and then the question was meaningless. But in September he went back to the valley, to his father, to school, and the world began to drag round its tired old axis. The hikers stopped coming then too. At the height of summer, on a weekend, she’d see as many as thirty or forty in the course of a day, but now, with the fall coming on, they left her to herself — sometimes she’d go for days without seeing a soul. But that was the point, wasn’t it?

She was making breakfast — a real breakfast for a change, ham and eggs from the propane refrigerator, fresh-dripped coffee and toast — when she spotted him working his way along one of the switchbacks below. She was immediately annoyed. It wasn’t even seven yet and the sign at the trailhead quite plainly stated that visitors were welcome at the lookout between the hours of ten and five only. What was wrong with this guy — did he think he was exempt or something? She calmed herself: maybe he was only crossing the trail. Deer season had opened — she’d been hearing the distant muted pop of gunfire all week — and maybe he was only a hunter tracking a deer.

No such luck. When she glanced down again, flipping her eggs, peering across the face of the granite peak and the steep snaking trail that clung to it, she saw that he was coming up to the tower. Damn, she thought, and then the kettle began to hoot and her stomach clenched. Breakfast was ruined. Now there’d be some stranger gawking over her shoulder and making the usual banal comments as she ate. To them it might have been like Disneyland or something up here, but this was her home, she lived here. How would they like it if she showed up on their doorstep at seven o’clock in the morning?

She was eating, her back to the glass door, hoping he’d go away, slip over the lip of the precipice and disappear, vanish in a puff of smoke, when she felt his footfall on the trembling catwalk that ran round the outside of the tower. Still, she didn’t turn or look up. She was reading — she went through a truckload of books in the course of a season — and she never lifted her eyes from the page. He could gawk round the catwalk, peer through the telescope and hustle himself back on down the steps for all she cared. She wasn’t a tour guide. Her job was to watch for smoke, twenty-four hours a day, and to be cordial — if she was in the mood and had the time — to the hikers who made the sweaty panting trek in from the trailhead to join her for a brief moment atop the world. There was no law that said she had to let them in the shack or show them the radio and her plotting equipment and deliver the standard lecture on how it all worked. Especially at seven in the morning. To hell with him, she thought, and she forked up egg and tried to concentrate on her book.

The problem was, she’d trained herself to look up from what she was doing and scan the horizon every thirty seconds or so, day or night, except when she was asleep, and it had become a reflex. She glanced up, and there he was. It gave her a shock. He’d gone round the catwalk to the far side and he was standing right in front of her, grinning and holding something up to the window. Flowers, wildflowers, she registered that, but then his face came into focus and she felt something go slack in her: she knew him. He’d been here before.

“Lainie,” he said, tapping the glass and brandishing the flowers, “I brought you something.”

Her name. He knew her name.

She tried a smile and her face froze around it. The book on the table before her upset the saltshaker and flipped itself shut with a tiny expiring hiss. Should she thank him? Should she get up and latch the door? Should she put out an emergency call on the radio and snatch up the kitchen knife?

“Sorry to disturb you over breakfast — I didn’t know the time,” he said, and something happened to his grin, though his eyes — a hard metallic blue — held on to hers like pincers. He raised his voice to penetrate the glass: “I’ve been camping down on Long Meadow Creek and when I crossed the trail this morning I just thought you might be lonely and I’d surprise you”—he hesitated—“I mean, with some flowers.”

Her whole body was frozen now. She’d had crazies up here before — it was an occupational hazard — but there was something unnerving about this one; this one she remembered. “It’s too early,” she said finally, miming it with her hands, as if the glass were impervious to sound, and then she got up from her untouched ham and half-eaten eggs and deliberately went to the radio. The radio was just under the window where he was standing, and when she picked up the mike and depressed the talk button she was two feet from him, the thin wall of glass all that separated them.

“Needles Lookout,” she said, “this is Elaine. Zack, you there? Over.”

Zack’s voice came right back at her. He was a college student working on a degree in forestry, and he was her relief two days a week when she hiked out and went down the mountain to spend a day with her son, do her shopping and maybe hit a bar or movie with her best friend and soul mate, Cynthia Furman. “Elaine,” he said, above the crackle of static, “what’s up? See anything funny out there? Over.”

She forced herself to look up then and locate the stranger’s eyes — he was still grinning, but the grin was slack and unsteady and there was no joy in the deeps of those hard blue eyes — and she held the black plastic mike to her lips a moment longer than she had to before answering. “Nothing, Zack,” she said, “just checking in.”

His voice was tinny. “Okay,” he said. “Talk to you. Over and out.”

“Over and out,” she said.

And now what? The guy wore a hunting knife strapped to his thigh. His cheeks were caved in as if he were sucking candy, and an old-fashioned mustache, thick and reddish, hid his upper lip. Instead of a baseball cap he wore a wide-brimmed felt hat. Wyatt Earp, she thought, and she was about to turn away from the window, prepared to ignore him till he took the hint, till he counted off the hundred and fifty wooden steps and vanished down the path and out of her life, when he rapped again on the glass and said, “You got something to put these in — the flowers, I mean?”

She didn’t want his flowers. She didn’t want him on her platform. She didn’t want him in her thirteen-by-thirteen-foot sanctuary, touching her things, poking around, asking stupid questions, making small talk. “Look,” she said finally, talking to the glass but looking through him, beyond him, scanning the infinite as she’d trained herself to do, no matter what the problem, “I’ve got a job to do up here and the fact is no one’s allowed on the platform between the hours of five in the afternoon and ten in the morning”—now she came back to him and saw that his smile had collapsed—“you ought to know that. It says so in plain English right down there at the trailhead.” She looked away; it was over, she was done with him.

She went back to her breakfast, forcing herself to stare at the page before her, though her heart was going and the words meant nothing. Todd had been with her the first time the man had come. Todd was fourteen, tall like his father, blond-headed and rangy. He was a good kid, her last and final hope, and he seemed to relish the time he spent with her up here. It was a Saturday, the middle of the afternoon, and they’d had a steady stream of visitors since the morning. Todd was in the storage room below, reading comics (in its wisdom, the Forestry Service had provided this second room, twenty-five steps down, not simply for storage but for respite too — it was a box, a womb, with only a single dull high-placed window to light it, antithesis and antidote to the naked glass box above). Elaine was at her post, chopping vegetables for soup and scanning the horizon.

She hadn’t noticed him coming — there’d been so many visitors she wasn’t attuned to them in the way she was in the quiet times. She was feeling hospitable, lighthearted, the hostess of an ongoing party. There’d been a professor up earlier, an ornithologist, and they’d had a long talk about the golden eagle and the red-tailed hawk. And then there was the young girl from Merced — she couldn’t have been more than seventeen — with her baby strapped to her back, and two heavy-set women in their sixties who’d proudly made the two-and-a-half-mile trek in from the trailhead and were giddy with the thin air and the thrill of their own accomplishment. Elaine had offered them each a cup of tea, not wanting to spoil their fun and point out that it was still two and a half miles back out.

She’d felt his weight on the platform and turned to give him a smile. He was tall and powerful across the chest and shoulders and he’d tipped his hat to her and poked his head in the open door. “Enjoying the view?” he said.

There was something in his eyes that should have warned her off, but she was feeling sociable and buoyant and she saw the generosity in his shoulders and hands. “It’s nothing compared to the Ventura Freeway,” she deadpanned.

He laughed out loud at that, and he was leaning in the door now, both hands on the frame. “I see the monastic life hasn’t hurt your sense of humor any—” and then he paused, as if he’d gone too far. “Or that’s not the word I want, ‘monastic’—is there a feminine version of that?”

Pretty presumptuous. Flirtatious, too. But she was in the mood, she didn’t know what it was — maybe having Todd with her, maybe just the sheer bubbling joy of living on the crest of the sky — and at least he wasn’t dragging her through the same old tired conversation about loneliness and beauty and smoke on the horizon she had to endure about a hundred times a week. “Come in,” she said. “Take a load off your feet.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and removed his hat. He wore his hair in a modified punk style — hard irregular spikes — and that surprised her: somehow it just didn’t go with the cowboy hat. His jeans were stiff and new and his tooled boots looked as if they’d just been polished. He was studying her — she was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt, she’d washed her hair that morning in anticipation of the crowd, and her legs were good — she knew it — tanned and shaped by her treks up and down the trail. She felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time, an ice age, and she knew her cheeks were flushed. “You probably had a whole slew of visitors today, huh?” he said, and there was something incongruous in the enforced folksiness of the phrase, something that didn’t go with his accent, just as the haircut didn’t go with the hat.

“I’ve counted twenty-six since this morning.” She diced a carrot and tossed it into the pan to simmer with the onions and zucchini she’d chopped a moment earlier.

He was gazing out the window, working his hands on the brim of his hat. “Hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you’re the best thing about this view as far as I can see. You’re pretty. Really pretty.”

This one she’d heard before. About a thousand times. Probably seventy percent of the day-trippers who made the hike out to the lookout were male, and if they were alone or with other males, about ninety percent of those tried to hit on her in some way. She resented it, but she couldn’t blame them really. There was probably something irresistible in the formula: young woman with blond hair and good legs in a glass tower in the middle of nowhere — and all alone. Rapun-zel, let down your hair. Usually she deflected the compliment — or the moves — by turning officious, standing on her authority as Forest Service employee, government servant and the chief, queen and despot of the Needles Lookout. This time she said nothing. Just lifted her head for a quick scan of the horizon and then looked back down at the knife and the cutting board and began chopping green onion and cilantro.

He was still watching her. The bed was big, a double, one of the few creature comforts the Forestry Service provided up here. There was no headboard, of course — just a big flat hard slab of mattress attached to the wall at window level, so you could be lying in bed and still do your job. Presumably, it was designed for couples. When he spoke again, she knew what he was going to say before the words were out of his mouth. “Nice bed,” he said.

What did she expect? He was no different from the rest — why would he be? All of a sudden he’d begun to get on her nerves, and when she turned her face to him her voice was cold. “Have you seen the telescope,” she said, indicating the Bushnell Televar mounted on the rail of the catwalk — beyond the window and out the door.

He ignored her. He rose to his feet. Thirteen by thirteen: two’s a crowd. “You must get awfully lonely up here,” he said, and his voice was different now too, no attempt at folksiness or jocularity, “a pretty woman like you. A beautiful woman. You’ve got sexy legs, you know that?”

She flushed — he could see that, she was sure of it — and the flush made her angry. She was about to tell him off, to tell him to get the hell out of her house and stay out, when Todd came rumbling up the steps, wild-eyed and excited. “Mom!” he shouted, and he was out of breath, his voice high-pitched and hoarse, “there’s water leaking all over the place out there!”

Water. It took a moment to register. The water was precious up here, irreplaceable. Once a month two bearded men with Forestry Service patches on their sleeves brought her six twenty-gallon containers of it — in the old way, on the backs of mules. She husbanded that water as if she were in the middle of the Negev, every drop of it, rarely allowing herself the luxury of a quick shampoo and rinse, as she had that morning. In the next instant she was out the door and jolting down the steps behind her son. Down below, outside the storage room where the cartons were lined up in a straight standing row, she saw that the rock, face was slick with a finely spread sheen of water. She bent to the near carton. It was leaking from a thin milky stress fracture in the plastic, an inch from the bottom. “Take hold of it, Todd,” she said. “We’ve got to turn it over so the leak’s on top.”

Full, the carton weighed better than a hundred and sixty pounds, and this one was nearly full. She put her weight behind it, the power of her honed and muscular legs, but the best she could do, even with Todd’s help, was to push the thing over on its side. She was breathing hard, sweating, she’d scraped her knee and there was a stipple of blood on the skin over the kneecap. It was then that she became aware of the stranger standing there behind her. She looked up at him framed against the vastness of the sky, the sun in his face, his big hands on his hips. “Need a hand there?” he asked.

Looking back on it, she didn’t know why she’d refused — maybe it was the way Todd gaped at him in awe, maybe it was the old pretty-woman/lonely-up-here routine or the helpless-female syndrome — but before she could think she was saying “I don’t need your help: I can do it myself.”

And then his hands fell from his hips and he backed away a step, and suddenly he was apologetic, he was smooth and funny and winning and he was sorry for bothering her and he just wanted to help and he knew she was capable, he wasn’t implying anything — and just as suddenly he caught himself, dropped his shoulders and slunk off down the steps without another word.

For a long moment she watched him receding down the trail, and then she turned back to the water container. By the time she and Todd got it upended it was half empty.

Yes. And now he was here when he had no right to be, now he was intruding and he knew it, now he was a crazy defining new levels of the affliction. She’d call in an emergency in a second — she wouldn’t hesitate — and they’d have a helicopter here in less than five minutes, that’s how quick these firefighters were, she’d seen them in action. Five minutes. She wouldn’t hesitate. She kept her head down. She cut and chewed each piece of meat with slow deliberation and she read and reread the same paragraph until it lost all sense. When she looked up, he was gone.

After that, the day dragged on as if it would never end. He couldn’t have been there more than ten minutes, slouching around with his mercenary grin and his pathetic flowers, but he’d managed to ruin her day. He’d upset her equilibrium and she found that she couldn’t read, couldn’t sketch or work on the sweater she was knitting for Todd. She caught herself staring at a fixed point on the horizon, drifting, her mind a blank. She ate too much. Lunch was a ceremony, dinner a ritual. There were no visitors, though for once she longed for them. Dusk lingered in the western sky and when night fell she didn’t bother with her propane lantern but merely sat there on the corner of the bed, caught up in the wheeling immensity of the constellations and the dream of the Milky Way.

And then she couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of him, the stranger with the big hands and secretive eyes, kept scanning the catwalk for the sudden black shadow of him. If he came at seven in the morning, why not at three? What was to prevent him? There was no sound, nothing — the wind had died down and the night was clear and moonless. For the first time since she’d been here, for the first time in three long seasons, she felt naked and vulnerable, exposed in her glass house like a fish in a tank. The night was everything and it held her in its grip.

She thought about Mike then, about the house they’d had when he’d finished his degree and started as an assistant professor at a little state school out in the lost lush hills of Oregon. The house was an A-frame, a cabin with a loft, set down amidst the trees like a cottage in a fairy tale. It was all windows and everywhere you looked the trees bowed down and stepped into the house. The previous owner, an old widower with watery eyes and yellow hair climbing out of his ears, hadn’t bothered with blinds or curtains, and Mike didn’t like that — he was always after her to measure the windows and order blinds or buy the material for drapes. She’d balked. The openness, the light, the sense of connection and belonging: these were the things that had attracted her in the first place. They made love in the dark — Mike insisted on it — as if it were something to be ashamed of. After a while, it was.

Then she was thinking of a time before that, a time before Todd and graduate school, when Mike sat with her in the dormitory lounge, books spread out on the coffee table before them, the heat and murmur of a dozen other couples locking their mouths and bodies together. A study date. For hours she clung to him, the sofa like a boat pitching in a heavy sea, the tease of it, the fumbling innocence, the interminable foreplay that left her wet and itching while the wind screamed beyond the iced-over windows. That was something. The R.A. would flash the lights and it was quarter of one and they would fling themselves at each other, each step to the door drenched in hormones, sticky with them, desperate, until finally he was gone and she felt the loss like a war bride. Until the next night.

Finally — and it must have been two, three in the morning, the Big Dipper tugged down below the horizon, Orion looming overhead — she thought of the stranger who’d spoiled her breakfast. He’d sat there on the comer of the bed; he’d stood beyond the window with his sad bundle of flowers, devouring the sky. As she thought of him, in that very moment, there was a dull light thump on the steps, a faint rustle, movement, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. The seconds pounded in her head and the rustling — it was like the sweep of a broom — was gone, something in the night, a pack rat, the fleeting touch of an owl’s wing. She thought of those hands, the eyes, the square of those shoulders, and she felt herself being drawn down into the night in relief, and finally, in gratitude.

She woke late, the sun slanting across the floor to touch her lips and mask her eyes. Zachary was on the radio with the news that Oakland had clinched the pennant and a hurricane was tearing up the East Coast. “You sound awful,” he said. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Stargazing again, huh?”

She tried out a laugh for him. “I guess,” she said. There was a silence. “Jesus, you just relieved me. I’ve got four more days to put in before I come back down to the ground.”

“Just don’t get mystical on me. And leave me some granola this time, will you? And if you run out, call me. That’s my breakfast we’re talking about. And lunch. And sometimes, if I don’t feel like cooking—”

She cut him off: “Dinner. I know. I will.” She yawned. “Talk to you.”

“Yeah. Over and out.”

“Over and out.”

When she set the kettle on the grill there was gas, but when she turned her back to dig the butter out of the refrigerator, the flame was gone. She tried another match, but there was nothing. That meant she had to switch propane tanks, a minor nuisance. The tanks, which were flown in once a year by helicopter, were located at the base of the stairway, one hundred and fifty steps down. There was a flat spot there, a gap cut into the teeth of the outcrop and overhung on one side by a sloping twenty-foot-high wall of rock. On the other side, the first step was a thousand feet down.

She shrugged into her shorts, and because it was cold despite the sun — she’d seen snow as early as the fifth of September, and the month was almost gone now — she pulled on an oversized sweater that had once belonged to Mike. After she’d moved out she’d found it in a pillowcase she’d stuffed full of clothes. He hadn’t wanted it back. It was windy, and a blast knifed into her when she threw open the door and started down the steps. Big pristine tufts of cumulus hurried across the sky, swelling and attenuating and changing shape, but she didn’t see anything dark enough — or big enough — to portend a storm. Still, you could never tell. The breeze was from the north and the radio had reported a storm front moving in off the Pacific — it really wouldn’t surprise her to see snow on the ground by this time tomorrow. A good snowfall and the fire season would be over and she could go home. Early.

She thought about that — about the four walls of the little efficiency she rented on a dead street in a dead town to be near Todd during the winter — and hoped it wouldn’t snow. Not now. Not yet. In a dry year — and this had been the third dry year in a row — she could stay through mid-November. She reached the bottom of the steps and crouched over the propane tanks, two three-hundred-gallon jobs painted Forest Service green, feeling depressed over the thought of those four dull walls and the cold in the air and the storm that might or might not develop. There was gooseflesh on her legs and her breath crowded the air round her. She watched a ground squirrel, its shoulders bulky with patches of bright gray fur, dart up over the face of the overhang, and then she unfastened the coupling on the empty tank and switched the hose to the full one.

“Gas problems?”

The voice came from above and behind her and she jumped as if she’d been stung. Even before she whirled round she knew whose voice it was.

“Hey, hey: didn’t mean to startle you. Whoa. Sorry.” There he was, the happy camper, knife lashed to his thigh, standing right behind her, two steps up. This time his eyes were hidden behind a pair of reflecting sunglasses. The brim of the Stetson was pulled down low and he wore a sheepskin coat, the fleecy collar turned up in back.

She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t smile. Couldn’t humor him. He’d caught her out of her sanctuary, caught her out in the open, one hundred and fifty steep and unforgiving steps from the radio, the kitchen knife, the hard flat soaring bed. She was crouching. He towered above her, his shoulders cut out of the sky. Todd was in school. Mike — she didn’t want to think about Mike. She was all alone.

He stood there, the mustache the only thing alive in his face. It lifted from his teeth in a grin. “Those things can be a pain,” he said, the folksy tone creeping into his voice, “those tanks, I mean. Dangerous. I use electricity myself.”

She lifted herself cautiously from her crouch, the hard muscles swelling in her legs. She would have risked a dash up the stairs, all hundred and fifty of them, would have put her confidence in her legs, but he was blocking the stairway — almost as if he’d anticipated her. She hadn’t said a word yet. She looked scared, she knew it. “Still camping?” she said, fighting to open up her face and give him his smile back, insisting on banality, normalcy, the meaningless drift of meaningless conversation.

He looked away from her, light flashing from the slick convexity of the sunglasses, and kicked at the edge of the step with the silver-tipped toe of his boot. After a moment he turned back to her and removed the sunglasses. “Yeah,” he said, shrugging. “I guess.”

It wasn’t an answer she expected. He guessed? What was that supposed to mean? He hadn’t moved a muscle and he was watching her with that look in his eyes — she knew that look, knew that stance, that mustache and hat, but she didn’t know his name. He knew hers but she didn’t know his, not even his first name. “I’m sorry,” she said, and when she put a hand up to her eyes to shade them from the sun, it was trembling, “but what was your name again? I mean, I remember you, of course, not just from yesterday but from that time a month or so ago, but …” She trailed off.

He didn’t seem to have heard her. The wind sang in the trees. She just stood there, squinting into the sun — there was nothing else she could do. “I wasn’t camping, not really,” he said. “Not that I don’t love the wilderness — and I do camp, backpack and all that — but I just — I thought that’s what you’d want to hear.”

What she’d want to hear? What was he talking about? She stole a glance at the tower, sun flashing the windows, clouds pricked on the peak of the roof, and it seemed as distant as the stars at night. If only she were up there she’d put out an emergency, she would, she’d have them here in five minutes ….

“Actually,” and he looked away now, his shoulders slumping in that same hangdog way they had when she’d refused his help with the water carton, “actually I’ve got a cabin up on Cedar Slope. I just, I just thought you’d want to hear I was camping.” He’d been staring down at the toes of his boots, but suddenly he looked up at her and grinned till his back fillings glinted in the light. “I think Elaine’s a pretty name, did I tell you that?”

“Thank you,” she said, almost against her will, and softly, so softly she could barely hear it herself. He could rape her here, he could kill her, anything. Was that what he wanted? Was that it? “Listen,” she said, pushing it, she couldn’t help herself, “listen, I’ve got to get back to work—”

“I know, I know,” he said, holding up the big slab of his hand, “back to the nest, huh? I know I must be a pain in the — in the butt for you, and I’ll bet I’m not the first one to say it, but you’re just too good-looking a woman to be wasted out here on the squirrels and coyotes.” He stepped down, stepped toward her, and she thought in that instant of trying to dart past him, a wild thought, instinctual and desperate, a thought that clawed its way into her brain and froze there before she could move. “Jesus,” he said, and his voice was harsh with conviction, “don’t you get lonely?”

And then she saw it, below and to the right, movement, two bobbing pink hunter’s caps, coming up the trail. It was over. Just like that. She could walk away from him, mount the stairs, lock herself in the tower. But why was her heart still going, why did she feel as if it hadn’t even begun? “Damn,” she said, directing her gaze, “more visitors. Now I really have to get back.”

He followed her eyes and looked down to where the hunters sank out of view and then bobbed back up again, working their way up the path. She could see their faces now — two men, middle-aged, wispy hair sticking out from beneath the fluorescent caps. No guns. Cameras. He studied them a moment and then looked into her eyes, looked deep, as if he’d lost something. Then he shrugged, turned his back and started down the path toward them.

She was in good shape, the best shape of her life. She’d been up the steps a thousand times, two thousand, but she’d never climbed them quicker than she did now. She flew up the stairs like something blown by the wind and she felt a kind of panic beating against her ribs and she smelled the storm coming and felt the cold to the marrow of her bones. And then she reached the door and slammed it shut behind her, fumbling for the latch. It was then, only then, that she noticed the flowers. They were in the center of the table, in a cut-glass vase, lupine, groundsel, forget-me-not.

It snowed in the night, monstrous swirling oversized flakes that clawed at the windows and filled her with despair. The lights would only have made her feel vulnerable and exposed, and for the second night running she did without them, sitting there in the dark, cradling the kitchen knife and listening for his footfall on the steps while the sky fell to pieces around her. But he wouldn’t come, not in this weather, not at night — she was being foolish, childish, there was nothing to worry about. Except the snow. It meant that her season was over. And if her season was over, she had to go back down the mountain and into the real world, real time, into the smog and roar and clutter.

She thought of the four walls that awaited her, the hopeless job — waitressing or fast food or some such slow crucifixion of the spirit — and she thought of Mike before she left him, saw him there in the black glass of the window, sexless, pale, the little butterfly-wing bifocals perched on the tip of his nose, pecking at the typewriter, pecking, pecking, in love with Dryden, Swift, Pope, in love with dead poets, in love with death itself. She’d met a man at a party a month after she’d left him and he was just like Mike, only he was in love with arthropods. Arthropods. And then she came up to the tower.

She woke late again and the first thing she felt was relief. The sun was out and the snow — it was only a dusting, nothing really — had already begun to recede from the naked high crown of the rock. She put on the kettle and went to the radio. “Zack,” she called, “Needle Rock. Do you copy?”

He was there, right at her fingertips. “Copy. Over.”

“We had some snow up here — nothing much, just a dusting really. It’s clear now.”

“You’re a little late — Lewis already checked in from Mule Peak with that information. Oversleep again?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” She was watching the distant treetops shake off the patina of snow. A hawk sailed across the window. She held the microphone so close to her lips it could have been a part of her. “Zack—” She wanted to tell him about the crazy, about the man in the Stetson, about his hands, wanted to alert him just in case, but she hesitated. Her voice was tiny, detached, lost in the electronic crackle of time and space.

“Lainie?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m here.”

“There’s a cold front coming through, another storm behind it. They’re saying it could drop some snow. The season’s still on — Reichert says it will be until we get appreciable precipitation — but this one could be it. It’s up to you. You want to come out or wait and see?”

Reichert was the boss, fifty, bald, soft as a clam. The mountains were parched — six inches of powdery duff covered the forest floor and half the creeks had run dry. The season could last till November. “Wait and see,” she said.

“Okay, it’s your choice. Lewis is staying too, if it makes you feel better. I’ll keep in touch if anything develops on this end.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Over and out.”

“Over and out.”

It clouded up late in the afternoon and the sky closed in on her again. The temperature began to drop. It looked bad. It was early for snow yet, but they could get snow any time of the year at this altitude. The average was twenty-five feet annually, and she’d seen storms drop four and five feet at a time. She talked to Zack at four and he told her it looked pretty grim — they were calling for a seventy-percent chance of snow, with the snow level dropping to three thousand feet. “I’ll take my chances,” she told him. There was a pair of snowshoes in the storage room if it came to that.

The snow started an hour later. She was cooking dinner — brown rice and vegetables — and she’d opened the bottle of wine she’d brought up to commemorate the last day of the season. The flakes were tiny, pellets that sifted down with a hiss, the sort of configuration that meant serious snow. The season was over. She could drink her wine and then think about packing up and cleaning the stove and refrigerator. She put another log on the woodstove and buttoned up her jacket.

The wine was half gone and she’d sat down to eat when she noticed the smoke. At first she thought it must be a trick of the wind, the smoke from her own stove twisting back on her. But no. Below her, no more than five hundred feet, just about where the trail would be, she could see the flames. The wind blew a screen of snow across the window. There hadn’t been any lightning — but there was a fire down there, she was sure of it. She got up from the table, snatched her binoculars from the hook by the door and went out on the catwalk to investigate.

The wind took her breath away. All the universe had gone pale, white above and white beneath: she was perched on the clouds, living in them, diaphanous and ghostly. She could smell the smoke on the wind now. She lifted the binoculars to her eyes and the snow screened them; she tried again and her hair beat at the lenses. It took her a moment, but there, there it was: a fire leaping up out of the swirling grip of the snow. A campfire. But no, this was bigger, fallen trees stacked up in a pyramid — this was a bonfire, deliberate, this was a sign. The snow took it away from her. Her fingers were numb. When the fire came into focus again she saw movement there, a shadow leaping round the flames, feeding them, reveling in them, and she caught her breath. And then she saw the black stabbing peak of the Stetson and she understood.

He was camping.

Camping. He could die out there — he was crazy, he was—this thing could turn into a blizzard, it could snow for days. But he was camping. And then the thought came to her: he was camping for her.

Later, when the tower floated out over the storm and the coals glowed in the stove and the darkness settled in around her like a blanket, she disconnected the radio and put the knife away in the drawer where it belonged. Then she propped herself in the corner of the bed, way out over the edge of the abyss, and watched his fire raging in the cold heart of the night. He would be back, she knew that now, and she would be ready for him.

(1989)

IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY

The water was a heartbeat, a pulse, it stole the heat from his body and pumped it to his brain. Beneath the surface, magnified through the shimmering lens of his face mask, were silver shoals of fish, forests of weed, a silence broken only by the distant throbbing hum of an outboard. Above, there was the sun, the white flash of a faraway sailboat, the weatherbeaten dock with its weatherbeaten row-boat, his mother in her deck chair, and the vast depthless green of the world beyond.

He surfaced like a dolphin, spewing water from the vent of his snorkel, and sliced back to the dock. The lake came with him, two bony arms and the wedge of a foot, the great heaving splash of himself flat out on the dock like something thrown up in a storm. And then, without pausing even to snatch up a towel, he had the spinning rod in hand and the silver lure was sizzling out over the water, breaking the surface just above the shadowy arena he’d fixed in his mind. His mother looked up at the splash. “Tiller,” she called, “come get a towel.”

His shoulders quaked. He huddled and stamped his feet, but he never took his eyes off the tip of the rod. Twitching it suggestively, he reeled with the jerky, hesitant motion that would drive lunker fish to a frenzy. Or so he’d read, anyway.

“Tilden, do you hear me?”

“I saw a Northern,” he said. “A big one. Two feet maybe.” The lure was in. A flick of his wrist sent it back. Still reeling, he ducked his head to wipe his nose on his wet shoulder. He could feel the sun on his back now and he envisioned the skirted lure in the water, sinuous, sensual, irresistible, and he waited for the line to quicken with the strike.

The porch smelled of pine — old pine, dried up and dead — and it depressed him. In fact, everything depressed him — especially this vacation. Vacation. It was a joke. Vacation from what?

He poured himself a drink — vodka and soda, tall, from the plastic half-gallon jug. It wasn’t noon yet, the breakfast dishes were in the sink, and Tiller and Caroline were down at the lake. He couldn’t see them through the screen of trees, but he heard the murmur of their voices against the soughing of the branches and the sadness of the birds. He sat heavily in the creaking wicker chair and looked out on nothing. He didn’t feel too hot. In fact, he felt as if he’d been cored and dried, as if somebody had taken a pipe cleaner and run it through his veins. His head ached too, but the vodka would take care of that. When he finished it, he’d have another, and then maybe a grilled swiss on rye. Then he’d start to feel good again.

His father was talking to the man and his mother was talking to the woman. They’d met at the bar about twenty drinks ago and his father was into his could-have-been, should-have-been, way-back-when mode, and the man, bald on top and with a ratty beard and long greasy hair like his father’s, was trying to steer the conversation back to building supplies. The woman had whole galaxies of freckles on her chest, and she leaned forward in her sundress and told his mother scandalous stories about people she’d never heard of. Tiller had drunk all the Coke and eaten all the beer nuts he could hold. He watched the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign flash on and off above the bar and he watched the woman’s freckles move in and out of the gap between her breasts. Outside it was dark and a cool clean scent came in off the lake.

“Uh huh, yeah,” his father was saying, “the To the Bone Band. I played rhythm and switched off vocals with Dillie Richards….”

The man had never heard of Dillie Richards.

“Black dude, used to play with Taj Mahal?”

The man had never heard of Taj Mahal.

“Anyway,” his father said, “we used to do all this really outrageous stuff by people like Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Luther Allison—”

“She didn’t,” his mother said.

The woman threw down her drink and nodded and the front of her dress went crazy. Tiller watched her and felt the skin go tight across his shoulders and the back of his neck, where he’d been burned the first day. He wasn’t wearing any underwear, just shorts. He looked away. “Three abortions, two kids,” the woman said. “And she never knew who the father of the second one was.”

“Drywall isn’t worth a damn,” the man said. “But what’re you going to do?”

“Paneling?” his father offered.

The man cut the air with the flat of his hand. He looked angry. “Don’t talk to me about paneling,” he said.

Mornings, when his parents were asleep and the lake was still, he would take the rowboat to the reedy cove on the far side of the lake where the big pike lurked. He didn’t actually know if they lurked there, but if they lurked anywhere, this would be the place. It looked fishy, mysterious, sunken logs looming up dark from the shadows beneath the boat, mist rising like steam, as if the bottom were boiling with ravenous, cold-eyed, killer pike that could slice through monofilament with a snap of their jaws and bolt ducklings in a gulp. Besides, Joe Matochik, the old man who lived in the cabin next door and could charm frogs by stroking their bellies, had told him that this was where he’d find them.

It was cold at dawh and he’d wear a thick homeknit sweater over his T-shirt and shorts, sometimes pulling the stretched-out hem of it down like a skirt to warm his thighs. He’d take an apple with him or a slice of brown bread and peanut butter. And of course the orange lifejacket his mother insisted on.

When he left the dock he was always wearing the lifejacket — for form’s sake and for the extra warmth it gave him against the raw morning air. But when he got there, when he stood in the swaying basin of the boat to cast his Hula Popper or Abu Reflex, it got in the way and he took it off. Later, when the sun ran through him and he didn’t need the sweater, he balled it up on the seat beside him, and sometimes, if it was good and hot, he shrugged out of his T-shirt and shorts too. No one could see him in the cove, and it made his breath come quick to be naked like that under the morning sun.

“I heard you,” he shouted, and he could feel the veins stand out in his neck, the rage come up in him like something killed and dead and brought back to life. “What kind of thing is that to tell a kid, huh? About his own father?”

She wasn’t answering. She’d backed up in a comer of the kitchen and she wasn’t answering. And what could she say, the bitch? He’d heard her. Dozing on the trundle bed under the stairs, wanting a drink but too weak to get up and make one, he’d heard voices from the kitchen, her voice and Tiller’s. “Get used to it,” she said, “he’s a drunk, your father’s a drunk,” and then he was up off the bed as if something had exploded inside of him and he had her by the shoulders — always the shoulders and never the face, that much she’d taught him — and Tiller was gone, out the door and gone. Now, her voice low in her throat, a sick and guilty little smile on her lips, she whispered, “It’s true.”

“Who are you to talk? — you’re shit-faced yourself.” She shrank away from him, that sick smile on her lips, her shoulders hunched. He wanted to smash things, kick in the damn stove, make her hurt.

“At least I have a job,” she said.

“I’ll get another one, don’t you worry.”

“And what about Tiller? We’ve been here two weeks and you haven’t done one damn thing with him, nothing, zero. You haven’t even been down to the lake. Two hundred feet and you haven’t even been down there once.” She came up out of the corner now, feinting like a boxer, vicious, her sharp little fists balled up to drum on him. She spoke in a snarl. “What kind of father are you?”

He brushed past her, slammed open the cabinet, and grabbed the first bottle he found. It was whiskey, cheap whiskey, Four Roses, the shit she drank. He poured out half a water glass full and drank it down to spite her. “I hate the beach, boats, water, trees. I hate you.”

She had her purse and she was halfway out the screen door. She hung there a second, looking as if she’d bitten into something rotten. “The feeling’s mutual,” she said, and the door banged shut behind her.

There were too many complications, too many things to get between him and the moment, and he tried not to think about them. He tried not to think about his father — or his mother either — in the same way that he tried not to think about the pictures of the bald-headed stick people in Africa or meat in its plastic wrapper and how it got there. But when he did think about his father he thought about the river-was-whiskey day.

It was a Tuesday or Wednesday, middle of the week, and when he came home from school the curtains were drawn and his father’s car was in the driveway. At the door, he could hear him, the chunk-chunk of the chords and the rasping nasal whine that seemed as if it belonged to someone else. His father was sitting in the dark, hair in his face, bent low over the guitar. There was an open bottle of liquor on the coffee table and a clutter of beer bottles. The room stank of smoke.

It was strange, because his father hardly ever played his guitar anymore — he mainly just talked about it. In the past tense. And it was strange too — and bad — because his father wasn’t at work. Tiller dropped his bookbag on the telephone stand. “Hi, Dad,” he said.

His father didn’t answer. Just bent over the guitar and played the same song, over and over, as if it were the only song he knew. Tiller sat on the sofa and listened. There was a verse — one verse — and his father repeated it three or four times before he broke off and slurred the words into a sort of chant or hum, and then he went back to the words again. After the fourth repetition, Tiller heard it:

If the river was whiskey,

And I was a divin’ duck,

I’d swim to the bottom,

Drink myself back up.

For half an hour his father played that song, played it till anything else would have sounded strange. He reached for the bottle when he finally stopped, and that was when he noticed Tiller. He looked surprised. Looked as if he’d just woke up. “Hey, ladykiller Tiller,” he said, and took a drink from the mouth of the bottle.

Tiller blushed. There’d been a Sadie Hawkins dance at school and Janet Rumery had picked him for her partner. Ever since, his father had called him ladykiller, and though he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, it made him blush anyway, just from the tone of it. Secretly, it pleased him. “I really liked the song, Dad,” he said.

“Yeah?” His father lifted his eyebrows and made a face. “Well, come home to Mama, doggie-o. Here,” he said, and he held out an open beer. “You ever have one of these, ladykiller Tiller?” He was grinning. The sleeve of his shirt was torn and his elbow was raw and there was a hard little clot of blood over his shirt pocket. “With your sixth-grade buddies out behind the handball court, maybe? No?”

Tiller shook his head.

“You want one? Go ahead, take a hit.”

Tiller took the bottle and sipped tentatively. The taste wasn’t much. He looked up at his father. “What does it mean?” he said. “The song, I mean — the one you were singing. About the whiskey and all.”

His father gave him a long slow grin and took a drink from the big bottle of clear liquor. “I don’t know,” he said finally, grinning wider to show his tobacco-stained teeth. “I guess he just liked whiskey, that’s all.” He picked up a cigarette, made as if to light it, and then put it down again. “Hey,” he said, “you want to sing it with me?”

All right, she’d hounded him and she’d threatened him and she was going to leave him, he could see that clear as day. But he was going to show her. And the kid too. He wasn’t drinking. Not today. Not a drop.

He stood on the dock with his hands in his pockets while Tiller scrambled around with the fishing poles and oars and the rest of it. Birds were screeching in the trees and there was a smell of diesel fuel on the air. The sun cut into his head like a knife. He was sick already.

“I’m giving you the big pole, Dad, and you can row if you want.”

He eased himself into the boat and it fell away beneath him like the mouth of a bottomless pit.

“I made us egg salad, Dad, your favorite. And I brought some birch beer.”

He was rowing. The lake was churning underneath him, the wind was up and reeking of things washed up on the shore, and the damn oars kept slipping out of the oarlocks, and he was rowing. At the last minute he’d wanted to go back for a quick drink, but he didn’t, and now he was rowing.

“We’re going to catch a pike,” Tiller said, hunched like a spider in the stern. There was spray off the water. He was rowing. He felt sick. Sick and depressed.

“We’re going to catch a pike, I can feel it. I know we are,” Tiller said, “I know it. I just know it.”

It was too much for him all at once — the sun, the breeze that was so sweet he could taste it, the novelty of his father rowing, pale arms and a dead cigarette clenched between his teeth, the boat rocking, and the birds whispering — and he closed his eyes a minute, just to keep from going dizzy with the joy of it. They were in deep water already. Tiller was trolling with a plastic worm and spinner, just in case, but he didn’t have much faith in catching anything out here. He was taking his father to the cove with the submerged logs and beds of weed — that’s where they’d connect, that’s where they’d catch pike.

“Jesus,” his father said when Tiller spelled him at the oars. Hands shaking, he crouched in the stern and tried to light a cigarette. His face was gray and the hair beat crazily around his face. He went through half a book of matches and then threw the cigarette in the water. “Where are you taking us, anyway,” he said, “—the Indian Ocean?”

“The pike place,” Tiller told him. “You’ll like it, you’ll see.”

The sun was dropping behind the hills when they got there, and the water went from blue to gray. There was no wind in the cove. Tiller let the boat glide out across the still surface while his father finally got a cigarette lit, and then he dropped anchor. He was excited. Swallows dove at the surface, bullfrogs burped from the reeds. It was the perfect time to fish, the hour when the big lunker pike would cruise among the sunken logs, hunting.

“All right,” his father said, “I’m going to catch the biggest damn fish in the lake,” and he jerked back his arm and let fly with the heaviest sinker in the tackle box dangling from the end of the rod. The line hissed through the guys and there was a thunderous splash that probably terrified every pike within half a mile. Tiller looked over his shoulder as he reeled in his silver spoon. His father winked at him, but he looked grim.

It was getting dark, his father was out of cigarettes, and Tiller had cast the spoon so many times his arm was sore, when suddenly the big rod began to buck. “Dad! Dad!” Tiller shouted, and his father lurched up as if he’d been stabbed. He’d been dozing, the rod propped against the gunwale, and Tiller had been studying the long suffering-lines in his father’s face, the grooves in his forehead, and the puffy discolored flesh beneath his eyes. With his beard and long hair and with the crumpled suffering look on his face, he was the picture of the crucified Christ Tiller had contemplated a hundred times at church. But now the rod was bucking and his father had hold of it and he was playing a fish, a big fish, the tip of the rod dipping all the way down to the surface.

“It’s a pike, Dad, it’s a pike!”

His father strained at the pole. His only response was a grunt, but Tiller saw something in his eyes he hardly recognized anymore, a connection, a charge, as if the fish were sending a current up the line, through the pole, and into his hands and body and brain. For a full three minutes he played the fish, his slack biceps gone rigid, the cigarette clamped in his mouth, while Tiller hovered over him with the landing net. There was a surge, a splash, and the thing was in the net, and Tiller had it over the side and into the boat. “It’s a pike,” his father said, “goddamnit, look at the thing, look at the size of it.”

It wasn’t a pike. Tiller had watched Joe Matochik catch one off the dock one night. Joe’s pike had been dangerous, full of teeth, a long, lean, tapering strip of muscle and pounding life. This was no pike. It was a carp. A fat, pouty, stinking, ugly mud carp. Trash fish. They shot them with arrows and threw them up on the shore to rot. Tiller looked at his father and felt like crying.

“It’s a pike,” his father said, and already the thing in his eyes was gone, already it was over, “it’s a pike. Isn’t it?”

It was late — past two, anyway — and he was drunk. Or no, he was beyond drunk. He’d been drinking since morning, one tall vodka and soda after another, and he didn’t feel a thing. He sat on the porch in the dark and he couldn’t see the lake, couldn’t hear it, couldn’t even smell it. Caroline and Tiller were asleep. The house was dead silent.

Caroline was leaving him, which meant that Tiller was leaving him. He knew it. He could see it in her eyes and he heard it in her voice. She was soft once, his soft-eyed lover, and now she was hard, unyielding, now she was his worst enemy. They’d had the couple from the roadhouse in for drinks and burgers earlier that night and he’d leaned over the table to tell the guy something — Ed, his name was — joking really, nothing serious, just making conversation. “Vodka and soda,” he said, “that’s my drink. I used to drink vodka and grapefruit juice, but it tore the lining out of my stomach.” And then Caroline, who wasn’t even listening, stepped in and said, “Yeah, and that”—pointing to the glass—“tore the lining out of your brain.” He looked up at her. She wasn’t smiling.

All right. That was how it was. What did he care? He hadn’t wanted to come up here anyway — it was her father’s idea. Take the cabin for a month, the old man had said, pushing, pushing in that way he had, and get yourself turned around. Well, he wasn’t turning around, and they could all go to hell.

After a while the chill got to him and he pushed himself up from the chair and went to bed. Caroline said something in her sleep and pulled away from him as he lifted the covers and slid in. He was awake for a minute or two, feeling depressed, so depressed he wished somebody would come in and shoot him, and then he was asleep.

In his dream, he was out in the boat with Tiller. The wind was blowing, his hands were shaking, he couldn’t light a cigarette. Tiller was watching him. He pulled at the oars and nothing happened. Then all of a sudden they were going down, the boat sucked out from under them, the water icy and black, beating in on them as if it were alive. Tiller called out to him. He saw his son’s face, saw him going down, and there was nothing he could do.

(1987)

JULIANA CLOTH

She was just sixteen, and still under her mother’s wing, when William Wamala first came to town with his bright bolts of cloth. He was a trader from the North, and he’d come across the vast gray plane of the lake so early in the morning he was like a ghost rising from the mist. Picture him there, out on the lake, the cylinders of rich cotton batik hanging limp over the prow of the invisible boat as if suspended in ether, no movement discernible but for the distant dip and rise of his arms, and all the birds crying out, startled, while the naked statue of his torso levitated above the still and glassy surface. The fishermen were the first to see him coming. They were the eyes of the village, just as the dogs were its nose, and as they cast their nets for dagaa they raised their palms in silent greeting.

Miriam — she was the only child of Ann Namirimu and the late Joseph Namirimu, who had been struck by lightning and scorched out of this existence when she was an infant strapped to her mother’s back — was at first unaware that the trader had arrived in town with a new season’s patterns. She was asleep at such an hour, crushed under the weight of her sixteen years and the disco dance she’d attended the night before with her Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe. Uncle Milton’s special friend, Gladys Makuma, had been there, and he danced with her all night while Aunt Abusaga danced with Miriam and a mural of boys and men painted themselves to the walls, alive only in their eyes. People were smoking and drinking beer and whiskey. The music thumped with a percussive bass, and the beat held steady except in those intervals when the electricity faltered and people fell laughing into each other’s arms. It was like Heaven, a picture-book Heaven, and Miriam, asleep, lived only to go back there and dance till her feet got so heavy she couldn’t lift them.

Coffee woke her. And griddle cakes. And the crowing of fugitive cocks. Her mother, richly draped in last year’s kanga and exuding a smell of warm sheets and butter, was fixing breakfast preparatory to her departure to the government office where she worked as a secretary. Miriam got up, and her dog got up with her. She ate with her mother in silence, sitting at the polished wooden table as if she were chained to it.

When her mother had left for work, Miriam dug a pack of cigarettes from an innocent-looking fold of her bedclothes and stuck one experimentally in the corner of her mouth. They were Top Club cigarettes (“For Men Whose Decisions Are Final”) and they’d been slipped into her hand at the disco dance, right there in the middle of the floor, while she was rolling her hips and cranking her shoulders in synch with the beat. And who had slipped them to her, unlooked for and unasked for, as a kind of tribute? A boy she’d known all her life, James Kariango, who was eighteen years old and as tall and wide-shouldered as any man. She felt a hand touch hers as everyone moved in a blur of limbs through sweat that was like a wall, the fumes of whiskey rose from the makeshift bar, and the shadowy blue clouds of smoke hung like curtains around imaginary windows, and there he was, dancing with a woman she’d never seen before and eclipsing his left eye in a sly wink.

She had never smoked a cigarette. Her mother wouldn’t allow it. Cigarettes were for common people, and Ann Namirimu was no common person — educated in the capital and sister to one of the president’s top advisers — and neither was her daughter. Her daughter was a lady, one of only eight girls in the village to go on to high school, and she would conduct herself like a lady at all times or suffer the rolling thunder and sudden strikes of her mother’s wrath, and, while Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe might have thought a disco dance appropriate for a young lady, Ann Namirimu certainly did not, and it was against her better judgment that Miriam had been allowed to go at all. Still, once Miriam had stuck the cigarette in her mouth and studied herself in the mirror from various angles, she couldn’t help putting a match to the tip of it and letting the sweet stinging smoke invade her mouth and swell out her cheeks until she exhaled like a veteran. She never took the smoke into her lungs, and she didn’t really like the taste of it, but she smoked the cigarette down to a nub, watching herself in the mirror all the while, and then she went out into the yard and carefully buried the remnant where her mother wouldn’t find it.

She fed her dog, swept the mats, and dressed for school in a dream oriented around the pulse of disco music and the movement of liberated bodies. Then she went off to school, barefoot, carrying her shoes in one hand and her satchel of books and papers in the other, thinking she might just have a peek at the market on her way.

It was early still, the sun long in the trees and all the striped and spotted dogs of the town stretching and yawning in the street, but it might as well have been noon in the marketplace. Everyone was there. Farmwives with their yams and tomatoes arranged in baskets and laid out on straw mats, a man selling smoked colobus monkey and pangas honed to a killing edge, the fishermen with their fresh-caught tilapia and tiger fish, the game and cattle butchers and the convocation of flies that had gathered to taste the wet sweetness of the carcasses dangling from metal hooks. And the crafts merchants, too — the women selling bright orange and yellow plastic bowls, pottery, mats and rugs and cloth. Cloth especially. And that was where Miriam found him, William Wamala, the smiling, handsome, persuasive young man and budding entrepreneur from the North, and his fine print cotton cloth, his Juliana cloth.

For that was what they christened it that morning, the crowd gathered around his stall that was nothing more than a rickety table set up at the far end of the marketplace where no one bothered about anything: Juliana cloth. William Wamala stood behind the table with his measuring tape and shears and the bolts of cloth in a blue so deep you fell into it, with slashes of pale papaya and bright arterial red for contrast. “How much for the Juliana cloth?” one woman asked, and they all knew the name was right as soon as she’d pronounced it. Because this print, unlike any they’d seen before, didn’t feature flowers or birds or palm fronds or the geometric patterns that had become so popular in the last few years but a name — a name in English, a big, bold name spelled out in the aforementioned colors that ran in crazy zigzags all over the deep-blue field. “Juliana,” it read. “Juliana, Juliana, Juliana.”

Miriam wanted the cloth as soon as she saw it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone wanted to be the first to appear in the streets or at the disco dance in a kanga cut from this scintillating and enticing cloth. But it was expensive. Very expensive. And exclusive to William Wamala. Who proved ultimately to be a very understanding and affectionate young man, willing to barter and trade if shillings were unavailable, accepting pots of honey, dried dagaa, beer, whiskey, and cigarettes in payment, and especially, when it came to the beauties of the town, exchanging his Juliana cloth for what might be considered their most precious commodity, a commodity that cost them nothing but pleasure in the trading.

When Miriam stopped in the market two mornings later, he was there still, but the crowd around him was smaller and the bolts of cloth much depleted. He sat back now in a new cane chair, his splayed feet crossed at the ankles and looming large over the scrap-strewn table, his smile a bit haggard, a beer pressed like a jewel to his lips. “Hello, Little Miss,” he crooned in a booming basso when he saw her standing there with her satchel between two fat-armed women wrapped in kangas that were as ancient as dust and not much prettier.

She looked him in the eye. There was nothing to be afraid of: Beryl Obote, fifteen and resplendent in Juliana cloth, had told her all about him, how he hummed and sang while removing a girl’s clothes and how insatiable he was, as if that very day were his last on earth. “Hello,” Miriam said, smiling widely. “I was just wondering how much the Juliana cloth is today?”

“For you?” He never even bothered to remove his feet from the table, and she could see the faintest glimmer of interest rising from the deeps of his eyes like a lonely fish, only to sink back down again into the murk. He was satiated, bloated with drink and drugs and rich food, rubbed so raw between his legs he could scarcely walk, and she was no beauty, she knew that. She made her eyes big. She held her breath. Finally, while the fat-armed women bickered over something in thin piping voices and the sun vaulted through the trees to take hold of her face, he quoted her a price. In shillings.

The first to fall ill was Gladys Makuma, Uncle Milton Metembe’s special friend. It was during the long rains in April, and many people were sick with one thing or another, and no one thought much about it at first. “Let her rest,” Miriam’s mother insisted from her long slab of an aristocrat’s face. “Give her tea with lemon and honey and an herbal broth in the evenings, and she’ll soon be on her feet again.” But Miriam’s mother was wrong.

Miriam went with Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton to Gladys Makuma’s neat mud-and-clapboard house to bring her beef tea and what comfort they could, and when they stepped into the yard there was Lucy Mawenzi, doyenne of the local healers, coming gray and shaken through the door. Inside was a wake, though Gladys Makuma wasn’t dead yet. Surrounded by her children, her husband, and his stone-faced sisters, she had shrunk into herself like some artifact in the dirt. All you could see of her face was nostrils and teeth, no flesh but the flesh of a mummy, and her hands on the sheets like claws. There would be no more disco-dancing for her, no more sharing a pint of whiskey with Uncle Milton Metembe in a dark boat on the dark, pitching lake. Even an optimist could see that, and Miriam was an optimist — her mother insisted on it.

With Beryl Obote, it was even worse, because Beryl was her coeval, a girl with skinny legs and saucer eyes who wore her hair untamed and had a laugh so infectious she could bring chaos to a classroom merely by opening her mouth. Miriam was coming back from the market one afternoon, the streets a soup of mud and an army of beetles crawling over every fixed surface, when she spotted Beryl in the crowd ahead of her, the Juliana cloth like the ocean come to life and her hair a dark storm brooding over it. But something was wrong. She was lurching from side to side, taking little circumscribed steps, and people were making way for her as if she were drunk. She wasn’t drunk, though when she fell to the ground, subsiding into the mud as if her legs had dissolved beneath her, Miriam saw that her eyes were as red as any drunkard’s. Miriam tried to help her up — never mind the yellow tub of matoke, rice and beans her mother had sent her for — but Beryl couldn’t find her feet, and there was a terrible smell about her. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said, and if you couldn’t smell it you could see it, the diarrhea and the blood seeping through the deep blue cloth into the fetid trodden mud.

After that everyone fell sick: the women who’d bought the Juliana cloth with their favors, their husbands, and their husbands’ special friends, not to mention all the men who had consorted with a certain barmaid at the disco — the one who wore a kanga in the blue, red, and papaya of decay. It was a hex, that was what people believed at first, a spell put on them by William Wamala, who had come all the way across the lake from the homeland of their ancestral enemies — he was a sorcerer, a practitioner of the black arts, an evil spirit in the guise of a handsome and affectionate young man. But it soon became apparent that no hex, no matter how potent and far-reaching, could affect so many. No, this was a disease, one among a host of diseases in a region surfeited with them, and it seemed only natural that they call it Juliana’s disease, after the cloth that had brought it to them.

Typically, it began with a headache and chills; then there was the loosening of the bowels and the progressive wasting. It could have been malaria or tuberculosis or marasmus, but it wasn’t. It was something new. Something no one had ever seen before, and all who caught it — women and men in their prime, girls like Beryl Obote — were eventually wrapped up in bark cloth and sent to the grave before the breath of two months’ time had been exhausted.

Uncle Milton Metembe and Aunt Abusaga contracted it at the same time, almost to the day, and Miriam moved into their house to tend them, afraid in her heart that the taint would spread to her. She cooked them soup and rice through the reek of their excrement, which flowed like stained water; she swept the house and changed their soiled sheets and read to them from the comic papers and the Bible. At night, the rats rustled in the thatch, and the things of the dark raised their voices in an unholy howl, and Miriam fell away deep into herself and listened to her aunt and uncle’s tortured breathing.

The doctors came then from America, France, and England, white people in white coats, and a few who were almost white and even stranger for that, as if they’d been incompletely dipped into the milk of white life. They drew blood like vampires, vial after vial, till the sick and weary trembled at the sight of them, and still there was no cause or cure in sight, the corpses mounting, the orphans wailing; then one day the doctors went away and the government made an announcement over the radio and in the newspapers. Juliana’s disease, the government said, was something new indeed, very virulent and always fatal, and it was transmitted not through cloth or hexes but through sexual contact. Distribution of condoms was being made possible by immediate implementation in every town and village, through the strenuous efforts of the government, and every man and woman, every wife and girl and special friend, should be sure of them every time sexual union was achieved. There was no other way and no other hope, short of monkhood, spinsterhood, or abstinence.

The news rocked the village. It was unthinkable. They were poor people who didn’t have theaters or supermarkets or shiny big cars for diversion — they had only a plate of dagaa, a glass of beer, and sex, and every special friend had a special friend and there was no stopping it, even on pain of death. Besides which, the promised condoms never arrived, as if any true man or sensitive woman would allow a cold loop of latex rubber to come between them and pleasure in any event. People went on, almost defiantly, tempting fate, challenging it, unshakable in their conviction that though the whole world might wilt and die at their feet, they themselves would remain inviolate. The disco was as crowded as ever, the sales of beer and palm wine skyrocketed, and the corpses were shunted in a steady procession from sickbed to grave. Whatever else it might have been, it was a time of denial.

Miriam’s mother was outraged. To her mind, the town’s reaction was nothing short of suicidal. Through her position at the government office she had been put in charge of the local campaign for safe sex, and it was her job to disseminate the unwelcome news. Though the condoms remained forever only forthcoming because of logistical problems in the capital, Miriam’s mother typed a sheet of warning and reproduced it a thousand times, and a facsimile of this original soon sagged damply from every tree and post and hoarding in town. “Love Carefully,” it advised, and “Zero Grazing,” a somewhat confusing command borrowed from one of the innumerable local agricultural campaigns. In fine print, it described the ravages of this very small and very dangerous thing, this virus (an entity for which there was no name in the local dialect), and what it was doing to the people of the village, the countryside, and even the capital. No one could have missed these ubiquitous sheets of warning and exhortation, and they would have had to be blind in any case to remain unaware of the plague in their midst. And deaf, too. Because the chorus of lament never ceased, day or night, and you could hear it from any corner of the village and even out in the mists of the lake — a thin, steady insectile wail broken only by the desperate beat of the disco.

“Suicide,” Miriam’s mother snarled over breakfast one morning, while Miriam, back now from her aunt and uncle’s because there was no longer any reason to be there, tried to bury her eyes in her porridge. “Irresponsible, filthy behavior. You’d think everybody in town had gone mad.” The day was still fresh, standing fully revealed in the lacy limbs of the yellow-bark acacia in the front yard. Miriam’s dog looked up guiltily from the mat in the corner. Somewhere a cock crowed.

A long minute ticked by, punctuated by the scrape of spoon and bowl, and then her mother rose angrily from the table and slammed her cup into the wash-up tub. All her fury was directed at Miriam, as if fury alone could erect a wall between an adolescent girl and James Kariango of the nicotine-stained fingers. “No better than animals in the bush,” she hissed, stamping across the floorboards with hunched shoulders and ricocheting eyes, talking to the walls, to the dense, mosquito-hung air, “and no shred of self-restraint or respect even.”

Miriam wasn’t listening. Her mother’s rhetoric was as empty as a bucket in a dry well. What did she know? Sex to her mother was a memory. “That itch,” she called it, as if it were something you caught from a poisonous leaf or a clump of nettles, but she never itched and as far as Miriam could see she’d as soon have a hyena in the house as a special friend. Miriam understood what her mother was telling her, she heard the fear seeping through the fierceness of that repetitive and concussive voice, and she knew how immortally lucky she was that William Wamala hadn’t found her pretty enough to bother with. She understood all that and she was scared, the pleading eyes of Beryl Obote, Aunt Abusaga, Uncle Milton Metembe, and all the rest unsettling her dreams and quickening her pace through the market, but when James Kariango crept around back of the house fifteen minutes later and raised two yellowed fingers to his lips and whistled like an innocuous little bird, she was out the door before the sweat had time to sprout under her arms.

The first time he’d come around, indestructible with his new shoulders, jaunty and confident and fingering a thin silver chain at his throat, Miriam’s mother had chased him down the front steps at the point of a paring knife, cursing into the trees till every head in the neighborhood was turned and every ear attuned. Tending Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton Metembe had in its way been Miriam’s penance for attracting such a boy — any boy — and she’d been safe there among the walking dead and the weight of their sorrows. But now she was home and the months had gone by and James Kariango, that perfect specimen, was irresistible.

Her mother had gone off to work. Her dog was asleep. The eyes of the world were turned to the market and the laundry and a hundred other things. It was very, very early, and the taste of James Kariango’s lips was like the taste of the sweetest fruit, mango and papaya and the sweet dripping syrup of fresh-cut pineapple. She kissed him there, behind the house, where the flowers grew thick and the lizards scuttered through the dirt and held their tails high in sign of some fleeting triumph. And then, after a long while, every pore of her body opening up like a desert plant at the first hint of rain, she led him inside.

He was very solemn. Very gentle. Every touch was electric, his fingers plugged into some internal socket, his face glowing like the ball at the disco. She let him strip off her clothes and she watched in fear and anticipation as he stepped out of his shorts and revealed himself to her. The fear was real. It was palpable. It meant the whole world and all of life. But then he laid her down in the familiar cradle of her bed and hovered over her in all of his glory, and, oh, it felt so good.

(1997)