The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Martha Moffett Dead Rock Singer

From The Chattahoochee Review

I didn’t believe it when someone pointed her out to me and told me she had once been married to Screwbosky. I was always surprised to learn something about him I didn’t already know. Like everybody who’s made it through the last ten years, I felt proprietary about the facts of his life. I could recite all the milestones, chapter and verse — and footnotes. The first concert at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, and right after it the all-night concert in Pittsburgh. The first gold record. The succession of brand names as he switched guitars, the motorcycle accident, the first time he snorted coke, the last time. Between what Screwbosky said to us and what he’d sung to us — and taking into consideration the books, the reviews, the interviews, and the newspaper stories — I thought I was in possession of pretty well everything about him that was public knowledge. At any rate, it was rare that anybody ever told me anything new. I also felt proprietary about his music. I lived it before he wrote it, surely I had a special right to feel that it was in some way mine, more meaningful to me than just any listener. Then this guy reaches over for a deviled egg and jerks his shoulder toward a woman at the end of the room. One wife I knew about, that was documented. So who was he talking about?

My disbelief must have registered on my face. “When she was younger, man,” my informant hissed as he pushed me along the table that was serving as a bar and pointed me in the direction of the far end of the split-level living room. Through the French windows at the other end of the room, Long Island Sound was a bright gray and the sky darker, as if the water was the source of light. The man beside me said something more, but the house was pounding with the worst kind of disco music and I couldn’t hear him. Some stored information was filtering into my conscious mind.

Yes. There had been an early marriage. Before Chicago, before the first album. A Sarah Lawrence type. There was something — a name, a label — that defined her. What had it been? A paragraph in one of those personality-cult magazines was coming back, something about her family or her background. What was it? I knew I’d get it in a minute. I remember stuff like that.

The people at the cocktail party Douglas had dragged me to formed such a classic suburban group that I had not bothered to make distinctions among the ones I had met so far. Doug’s new house was two streets over, one of some two dozen houses on a six-acre spit of land jutting away from the Connecticut shore. Local inhabitants like to think they live on an island, and in fact call the place Perth Island, although you won’t find it in an atlas. At one end of this piece of prime real estate, it’s true, the approach is over a bridge that lets the tide into a shallow bay. At that end, you could very well imagine you were on an island. But the other end is solid marshland, with a tidal creek trickling through. Perth Island could hardly be called a peninsula, much less an island. It’s a comma-shaped piece of land, firmly anchored at the head to the mainland, and attached at the other end by the bridge. I’d call it an aneurysm, in honor of the local death rate. Douglas says he waited for the overstressed executive who previously owned his house to drop dead, and finally he did.

Doug’s new house was not a new house, it was an old house newly purchased and now in the process of being modernized. “Nick, come and look it over,” he said to me after he’d signed the mortgage papers. I had come out to take a look. On the last day of the weekend, he insisted that we drop in at the party for a couple of drinks. It would give him an opportunity to meet some of his new neighbors. Knowing Douglas, I could bet he’d soon be on the board of the Perth Island Improvement Association, the group that made the rules on where people could park, what hours the two tiny scraps of communal beach could be used, how early one could put out the garbage, and other vital matters, WELCOME TO PERTH ISLAND. There was a sign at the little stone bridge that marked the causeway leading to the mainland. “Parking Rules Strictly Enforced P.I.I.A.” That was so that no strangers could come and use the beaches that the Perth Islanders raked and dredged and patrolled so possessively.

My weekend invitation was partly a working arrangement. I was supposed to advise Douglas on the basic renovations for the house and rehearse him on what he was to say to the contractor. Doug had vague but stubborn ideas of what he wanted, and he trusted me to read his mind and tell him how to express his wants. It was a fair exchange. Food and drink, a weekend in the country, a morning swim when the tide was high, in return for strolling around Doug’s property and talking about wood and glass and square footage. And then if he liked my designs for the kitchen, I was going to try to make a deal with him to do it myself. I’ve done similar projects for other friends. The art gallery near the corner of West Broadway and Prince — all my ideas, though I don’t get the credit.

All in all, an OK weekend. Even this party was not what I’d expected it to be. I’d forgotten the kinds of tasty things they serve at parties, and I was munching out on pate and deviled eggs with caviar and all those things that I never have because I eat pretty simply when I eat at my place and I never go to parties because they’re a waste of time.

“Which one is she?” I asked, looking at the group of people at the other end of the room. The women all looked alike to me. They were wearing the style that comes after preppy. Simple dresses, real pearls. Or skirts with shirts like their husbands’, with a cable knit sweater over their shoulders. Very League of Women Voters. Only this was a party, so they were all knocking it back — and it wasn’t white wine spritzers, it was vodka with maybe an ice cube. As I got closer I could see they were all mostly a little zonked.

“That’s her,” my informant said, and I peeled away from him as I suddenly remembered.

Storey Stanton, that was her name. Elizabeth Storey Stanton. That’s what I was trying to remember earlier — that she was called by her middle name. I was in college before I met anyone whose first name was actually a surname. Stuart, Tyler, Grantland, Brookes, and Phelps are from my freshman yearbook. Good old Phelps.

She was looking into her drink as if there was something floating in it. I was close enough to crane over her and look into her glass. There was nothing in it but the light reflecting off the surface of the drink, mooning back into her eyes. Elizabeth Storey Stanton. Radcliffe. That was it.

She looked up at me suddenly, shocked that anyone was standing there, so close to her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you jump. Is there something wrong with your drink? Can I get you another?”

“No. No, please don’t get me another. As a matter of fact, you could take this one away.”

I didn’t know what she wanted, but her voice was so humorless that I decided to do exactly as she said.

She wasn’t bad-looking. Fine light hair, cut off in a straight line at her shoulder. Eyes with those deep heavy lids that make it look like it takes an effort to hold them up. She reminded me a little of Eva Marie Saint, when she got to be too old for ingenue roles and they stuck her in comedies that didn’t suit her. I see her on TV late at night, gamely playing them through with the tension-etched smile, the weary gesture, the palpable civility. This woman even had the same kind of stance, elbows close to the body, one hand waving the glass in the air. “Give it to me,” I said, taking the drink out of her hand. “You don’t need that. Come and talk to me instead.”

I put our drinks down and took her hand and she followed me quietly enough. I didn’t know where I was going, of course, but I looked through an open door and found a small breakfast room, with a small glass table set for the morning meal. “Sit here,” I told her, and put her at one end of the table while I went to sit at the other. She smiled at me over the top of the table and I felt for a moment that we were actually sitting down to breakfast together.

She picked up an empty water glass and twirled it in her hands. “I’m afraid I’ve deprived you of your drink,” she apologized. “We don’t both have to go on the wagon at the same time.”

“It’s OK,” I told her. I almost said then, Look, I know who you are, Elizabeth Storey Stanton Screwbosky. You’re Lizzy in “Hard Midnight.” And “Bedtime Storey” is your song. And I guess you’re the one “Right of Way” was written for. You’re in all those early songs, the harsh ballads, the forty-fives I had to go back and find after that first time I saw him opening a concert for Led Zeppelin in Boston, the songs of loss that preceded the moving, speeding songs he was singing by the time of the Chicago concert. I walked out after his opening in Boston. I was afraid the heavy metal sound of Zeppelin would drive his songs out of my head.

But something stopped me from using her name — something told me to talk to her as if I didn’t know who she was, as if nobody had come up and hissed in my ear, “See that skinny washed-out blonde on the other side of the room? Swear to God, she was married to Screwbosky.” I might have talked to her anyway. She’s that kind of woman. The kind I pick up outside the Third Avenue exit of Bloomingdale’s, looking for a cab to take them to the Plaza. I thought then that I could have her. If I wanted to go to the trouble.

“Are you a friend of Karen’s?” she asked, naming our hostess’s daughter, one of the handful of people I had met coming in.

“No.”

“No? A business friend of Oscar’s?”

“No.”

“An uninvited guest?” She smiled.

“Almost. I came with Douglas Miller. He just bought a house on Dolphin Circle.”

“I know,” she nodded. “The old Chatwin place.”

I shrugged.

“I don’t know why we call it the old Chatwin place. The Chatwins were in it only ten years. That doesn’t seem very long, does it?” She had been smiling but it faded away. I wondered if she had remembered that it was just about ten years ago that Screw had died. Of course they must have been separated a long time before that. She was already out of his life before I ever heard of him. I would have remembered.

Her face was still, and I had a chance to look at her again. I thought she was about thirty-four or thirty-five. Her face looked softer up close, and younger. She glanced at me, to see if I was thinking what she was thinking, and I made my face say something else. But behind it, I was still thinking about Screw’s death. At that time I had thought, and had said to anybody who would listen, presidents are replaceable, the pope is replaceable. Screwbosky is not replaceable. And still nobody knows what happened. Somebody said an international terrorist got him. The dude caused me some terror, all right. The first I knew about it was six o’clock in the morning when my clock radio clicked on and they were playing his songs, on and on, all day and all night, for weeks.

“You don’t live around here, do you?” she was saying.

“In the city,” I said. “West Sixty-eighth Street. I come to the suburbs when I’m invited.”

“I haven’t been into town in such a long time, months and months. I’m going in next week, though. Thursday. It’s our anniversary, and my husband is taking me to lunch at the Russian Tea Room.”

They always mention their husbands pretty early in the conversation. It’s like flipping open a wallet to show an I.D. They all travel on their husbands’ passports, these thirty-five-year-old women.

I wonder if they ever think about how they can’t be found unless you do know their husbands’ names. “We’re in the book,” they say, but she isn’t; she’s hidden behind her husband’s name.

She was smiling across the table, relaxed now, pretty and sort of earnest, trying to draw me out. I felt then that the way she looked was the way she was, and I never had any reason to change my first impression. Now she entered into the game of the breakfast table. “Crumpets?” she asked. “Shall I pour your tea?”

“Yes, Elizabeth.”

She shot me a startled glance.

“Elizabeth Barrett. And I’ll read your sonnets and smuggle you out of this house and onto the next Alitalia flight.”

She looked over the gleaming crystal and china on the table and shook her head. “No... you be D. H. Lawrence and I’ll be Mrs. Weekley, the wife of your history professor, kindly having you in for a glass of sherry.”

I smiled at her, but I wondered if that was supposed to remind me that she was married. “How about Napoleon and Josephine?” I asked.

“Oh, OK. Let me change my costume.” She pulled her belt up under her breasts into an Empire line, and twisted two strands of hair in front of her ears, to lie against her cheeks. How could she have known that such pretense would please me?

I love these games. “There’s a terrific letter from Napoleon, in Verona, to Josephine, in Milan,” I told her. “First he scolds her for not writing to him and for flirting. Then he asks, ‘What do you do all day, Madame? What robs you of the time to write? Who can this wonderful new lover be who rules your days and prevents you from attending to me? Beware, Josephine: one fine night the doors will be broken down and there I shall be.’ ”

I said the last words in a voice that was a surprise even to me. She looked at me, startled I remember stuff like that, I can’t help it.

The music from the other room reached us here, but it was just background sound. The room we were in was quiet. It was domestic, in a funny way, with her sitting at one end of the table and me at the other. “I can see that life outside the city can be quite comfortable.”

She opened her mouth to answer, but then she stopped. I couldn’t figure out why for a moment, because I was obviously attentive. Then I realized that “Happy Hour” was playing, one of Screwbosky’s sweetest songs, an old one. I swear to you, if you buy me a drink, I’ll give you a happy... happy hour.

Things like this must happen to her all the time. “I always liked that song,” I said, to remind her that I was still there, and to see whether the music was something we could talk about. She looked at me blankly.

“I was saying, suburban life looks quite comfortable from here.”

“Comfortable?” she asked, as if comfort had never had any place on her list of requirements.

“Why don’t you come into the city sometime,” I said, which she could read like an invitation if she wanted to. “There’s nothing like the city. It’ll turn you on.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “I’m looking forward to Thursday.”

That wasn’t what I meant, but before I could say anything more someone blocked the small amount of light coming in at the door. I looked around. A suburban type. He was wearing his hair about half an inch too long for the cut, and his clothes were a size too large. “I want you to call home and check on that sitter,” he said. He didn’t say it unpleasantly. Just stating that that was what he wanted. She sighed.

“You know everything is all right. We’d be the first to hear if anything was wrong. But of course I’ll call and make sure.” She turned and looked into space somewhere between the man and me. “This is my husband, George Talbot. George, this is a friend of Karen’s.”

Did you catch it?

“I’m Nick,” I told her.

“Nicholas?” her husband asked, to make sure.

“No. Actually, Nicholai,” I said.

“Glad to meet you.” She had cooled his interest in me by labeling me with Karen’s name. I wondered why. He looked back at her. “Would you go and call the sitter? Easier from here than during dinner.”

“Excuse me.”

She left the room and he called after her, “One more drink and we’ll have to move on.” He turned to me. “We are expected for dinner a couple of houses down,” he explained. Her introduction left me still not knowing her name, as far as she was concerned. It left me with nothing to call her but Mrs. Talbot, which of all her names suited her least. The important thing was that I knew where she would be on Thursday. Ah, nothing is accidental, says Sigmund.

I couldn’t decide whether to remain neutral with her husband or ingratiate myself with him. I began to talk to him about the ideas I had for designing and building a kitchen for Doug. It would be stark — white Italian tile and natural wood, the wood sanded finer and finer and then rubbed with linseed oil. I found myself saying things to him like, “Carpentry is applied physics — a skill for dealing with the material world.” Pretty soon he was talking about all the projects he was going to get started on, as soon as he found the time. I was bored until Doug came along to fetch me, saying it was time to leave if I wanted to make my train back to the city. I was wearing faded jeans and my old Irish knit sweater, but when I put on the leather trench coat that Douglas had given me, I was better dressed than any of these suburban middle-level executives. Doug had given me the coat when he decided to abandon the city for the country, to show he wasn’t abandoning friends. It was the color of cinnamon and so fine you could wring it like a towel. Such gifts mean nothing to Douglas. He gets everything wholesale. Such gifts mean nothing to me, either.

I did not see her again as we made our way out of the house, but I thought about her going in on the train. Doug had kindly allowed me to take the sections of the Sunday New York Times he had finished with to keep me occupied on the ride in. But I mostly thought about Screw, and how long he’d been dead, and how he had died.

However it was he had died. No one ever believed the official statements. His family came and recovered the body and took it away for private ceremonies, or perhaps just to hide it, get him buried and forgotten as soon as possible. His father, the insurance salesman, had taken charge. The way Screw hated his father had helped me immensely in hating mine. His old man told reporters that it was natural causes and that they might as well leave him alone in the future, as he would never have anything more to say on his son’s death or life. And he never did.

It was late when I got home, but I put on the early albums, The Arm of the Needle and Hard Midnight, but not going any farther than the year Screw switched from acoustic to electric guitar. I couldn’t sleep, but I was peaceful. I had not had a project for a long time. I love it when I’m absorbed in a project — it’s the only time I do like. And I haven’t had a project since my father died. My last best project was his funeral.

I checked the answering device on the phone for messages. Nothing. I felt good. I still had three-quarters of a joint to smoke, something one of my passengers had passed me in lieu of a tip. The only thing that spoiled the serenity and hope of that evening was that the damn phone started ringing. I use the telephone a lot, but very few people have my number — only Douglas, my mother, a couple of others. So when it rang the first time I answered it without thinking, expecting it to be one of them. But I knew immediately that the voice belonged to no one I knew.

“Hey, man, can you do me a favor?”

“You’ve got the wrong number,” I told him.

“Chuck, this is Jim. You know, Jim.”

“You’ve got the wrong number. Dial again.”

“Can... you... hear... me?” the voice came.

“Fuck off,” I said, and hung up.

The record came to an end and in the silence before the next record dropped, the telephone rang again. It was the same voice.

“Hey, Chuck, we got trouble on this line. Can you hear me now? This is important. You’ve got to give Hal a message for me. Will you do that for me?”

“Man, for the last time, you have got the wrong number,” I said. “What number are you dialing?” Evidently he couldn’t hear me, or I was unable to interrupt him. He babbled on. I hung up again.

I was asleep the next time the phone rang. The tuner, still on, glowed like a banked campfire in the corner.

“Chuck, it’s important. You know I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important. Tell Hal I can’t come tomorrow, will you? I can’t keep the appointment, tell him. Something’s come up, I can’t get there. Will you do that for me?”

“Sure.”

“You gonna tell him? It’s important. I can’t get there. Got it?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Thanks. Don’t forget. Thanks, pal.”

What a bummer. I thought I’d never get back to sleep. Finally, I got up and put on The Last Album. Screw had called it Days Too Long, but everybody calls it The Last Album. It had everything in it of Screwbosky’s attitude toward death — and, as he said, he’d thought about it a long time. One part of him thought that life was too short. The other part thought that it was long enough.

I came down through the park on my bike with the wind blowing in my face. The sun was sitting high on top of the big horse chestnuts on the east side of the park. On the other side, a three-quarter moon was still in the sky, hanging white in the west. The two balls faced each other across the park, with me coming down between them. I cycled down the West Side traverse and shot out of the park at Columbus Circle, changing lanes twice and circling the statue to cut on down to Fifty-seventh Street. I turned east and passed Carnegie Hall, passed the restaurant, passed the spot where I once picked up Mick Jagger and two of his friends, and spun on down to Fifth. It was too early, I knew. But I’m like that. Always on time. Once I figure out what I’m going to do, doing anything else is a waste of time.

Anyway, I’d had it with the apartment. I had to get out. I’d been cleaning since I woke up that morning, and hardly made a dent. I just closed off the kitchen, figuring I would clean only the areas that would be visible. First, the bathroom. Change the cat’s box. Put up some new towels. I have this trick of scraping down the sink and tub with a single-edged razor blade. That gets the crud off. Then I pour bleach over everything, and what’s left turns white.

Then the bedroom. God, what a mess. I’d got out of the habit of making the waterbed. I couldn’t sleep on it anymore. I’d been sleeping on a sleeping bag on the living-room floor. One of the cats had caught a claw in the plastic and started a slow leak. Then she pissed in the gutter of water that rimmed the bed. I had to mend the leak, bail out the stinking water, and wipe the bed down. And find some clean sheets. I didn’t want to have to do a laundry. Luckily, there were some clean sheets, so I just stuffed everything that was dirty into one of the closets and closed the door.

The bathroom looked good. The bedroom was OK with the lights off and the curtains drawn. The living room would have to stay as it was, there was not much I could do about it. It was clean enough — there is not much furniture, besides my desk and worktable. The room is full of projects, scale models, theater designs, and so forth. Mostly unfinished. My friends like to think of me as an artist. They’re always introducing me as an artist or an architect or a designer. But I’m too self-critical to really get anywhere. None of the things I’ve started ever get finished. Nothing I do matches the idea as it first comes to me. And yet these half-done things suggest the whole things, so what’s the use of further fooling around? I’d just as soon be introduced as a cabby. Sometimes I correct people, after they’ve introduced me. “No, I’m not an artist. I drive a cab.”

I drove this week, three days in a row, to make a little money. I have this arrangement with Mike at the garage; he lets me take a cab out anytime I want to. I don’t make a lot. You have to hustle to make money driving, and I won’t hustle. But it suits me OK, driving. Gets me out of my apartment. I’d go crazy if I didn’t make myself get out from time to time.

Somewhere in the living room, in one of the big portfolios, I was sure I had a poster of the 1986 tour, the one that never happened. That poster is probably worth a lot of money now. A collector’s item. Screwbosky was dead before the first concert of the tour. After the sixties and the seventies were over and nobody much was dying anymore, he had to die. I had tickets for that lour. Madison Square Garden. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, just bought the records. I had never been physically closer to him than sitting down front, next to the stage, or standing by the corridor when the band passed through the auditorium to the platform. It never occurred to me then to try to get close to him. I just liked his music. He was part of a good time. It was a good time because I didn’t know yet that it was almost over. And now I have this second chance. Storey Stanton, now Mrs. Talbot, once Storey Screwbosky, was going to give me that chance. To get close to him.

What had I done with that poster? Just going through all my old stuff was slowing me down, wasting time, and I didn’t want to look at the past that much. I spotted the poster just as the phone rang. I didn’t want to talk to anybody at the moment, but I heard the telephone butler activate, so I flipped the switch so that I could hear the caller.

Yeah, it was Mom. Sophia. Hello, you little dumpling. She had already called twice that morning, but as usual she was intimidated by the recorded greeting and couldn’t bring herself to speak. I currently had the machine set up so that it started with the cavalry charge played at top volume by the best bugle you’d ever want to hear. It galvanizes most of my callers into saying whatever it is that’s on their minds. Not Sophia. She leaves her little silent moment of waiting on the machine, and hangs up.

But this time she is going to speak up. Brave little woman, Sophia. She talks fast, to get in as much as she can to her allotted half-minute.

“Peter? Peter, why don’t you answer your telephone? Your mother needs to speak to you. Why did you come into the shop on Monday? The clerks, they don’t know what to say to you. You took money from the cash register, they don’t know how to say no to you. I am not there on Mondays, you know that. On Mondays I go to see Father Stephanotis. Father wants to see you. He has not seen you since the funeral. He says, Peter is such a fine-looking young man. And such a brain. Why does he do the things he does? I don’t know, I have no answer, I am only a mother—”

She ran out of time. Not that there was any more to say. I ran the tape back, and then played it again, transferring it to the big tape recorder. It would be worth playing around with, maybe. Now that she’s left a message, I’ll have to call her back in the next day or two. Have to keep those rent checks coming. Sophia pays my rent in an arrangement by which the checks are debited against whatever my share of the estate will be. You have no idea how much time I have to spend on her to keep this arrangement going.

I tacked up the poster. Screw is wearing leather pants and an open leather jacket, no shirt. He’s holding a mike in his left hand, high and close to his face, like a light. His Gibson J-200 is hanging from his neck. His right hand cups his ear. His eyes are half closed, his head turned a little so that his two trademarks, the beaky nose and the wild hair, are outlined against the spotlights. National Tour, June 17-July 23, 1986, it says. I was still enrolled at Columbia that year. I was still going to be a college graduate, a professional.

I almost coasted into a yellow cab that was making the light late. “Watch it, you stinkin’ coprolite,” he said. Or that’s what I think he said. “Get outta my way, shitstabber,” I replied. He shouted something more as he accelerated down Fifty-ninth Street, and I gave him the finger. Of course, I belong to that confederacy of cab drivers. I had been driving all week, but now I was on the other side — one of them — the vast army of bodies whose aim in life is to keep cab drivers from reaching their destinations swiftly and efficiently.

I crossed over to the park side and cycled back to the west end of the park, where there’s a broad paved entrance. I circled around there, just inside the park, killing time, doing figure eights and slow U-turns, testing the slow-speed stability of the bike. I’ve rebuilt this bike about three times. I went slower and slower, until the bike was motionless, balanced in a perfect track stand. I held it for a minute or two, then pushed off into another series of U-turns, dodging pedestrians. There was a hot-dog vendor standing there watching me. He’s got the good ones, with the onion sauce, the sauerkraut, and the pickle relish, but I don’t eat crap like that anymore. When the kitchen is cleaned up, I prepare my own food — brown rice, vegetables, tofu, yogurt. I didn’t get around to cleaning the kitchen today, just closed the door, but I’m going to do it next. It’s good that I’m beginning to get the place cleaned up. I haven’t brought anybody home for a long time, because it was such a mess. Since the last one, I just haven’t bothered. The last one was this woman I met on the 104 bus. I sat down beside her and she just came home with me. The one before that was when I was making a long-distance call and needed some help from the operator. The operator turned out to be this woman with a great voice. I got to talking to her and I talked her into coming to my apartment on her lunch break. Can you believe that? I just wanted to see if she would really come. I can’t remember now which was which, they both left the same way. Just gathering themselves up, rolling over to the side of the bed, feeling around for their clothes. They looked like they forgot already. I really resent that, when they just get up and go. After all, I give full measure in bed. Oh, yeah, it’s more than just performance with me.

I headed back downtown and wasted some time leaning against the iron gate at the subway. I was across the avenue when I saw them come out of the restaurant. They walked a few steps on the sidewalk and then turned to face each other. I couldn’t tell if they were talking or not, it didn’t look as if they were. Damn it, what were they going to do next? Logically, he should go back to his office and she should go shopping or to a movie. Isn’t that what suburban ladies do on their day in town?

What’s-his-name, George, turned and started for the near corner, and she watched him walk away. I started crossing the avenue, knowing that neither one of them would notice me at this point. She crossed her wrists in front of her, pulling her jacket tight. Then she turned and started for the far end of the block, heading toward Fifth.

I came up behind her, passing her the first time, just glancing around, keeping close to the sidewalk. It was then that I saw that her eyes were full of tears and she probably couldn’t have seen me anyway. I circled back and came by her again, this time calling out.

“Hey. Hey, Mrs. Talbot. Mrs. Talbot?”

She brushed the tears away quickly, almost as if she was just brushing her hair back. I had passed her again by now. I turned around and cycled down the sidewalk, stopping beside her. “Hello, Mrs. Talbot. I thought that was you.” I smiled at her. “What are you doing in town?”

“Oh, it’s—”

“It’s Nick. Remember me?”

“Of course I do. How are you?”

“Fine. Wait a minute.” I got off the bike and turned it to face the direction she was walking in and fell into step beside her. “Where are you heading?”

She flung up her hands, with her elbows pressed in to her waist, in that funny angular movement I had noticed before.

“I don’t know.”

“Come home with me,” I said.

She looked at me, dry-eyed now and alert.

“Let me make you a cup of tea, I’ve got some Celestial Tea at home. We can walk up through the park. I live just up the avenue, between Lincoln Center and Central Park West. It’s really nice in the park today. Come on.”

She came.

She was all right in bed. She really was. I was surprised. I mean, I had thought about fucking her, but I hadn’t thought about her, how she would be. She really was there for me, holding on to me, patting and stroking. I loved the way she touched me. I asked her later about that, how it was that she was so good with her hands. She said she thought she had learned how to touch people from holding her children, that she had not known before.

You’re probably wondering what we talked about, coming up through the park. Nothing much. I pointed out the moon and the sun to her, they were still there. I sang a Provencal song about the moon. I told her I liked her hair. I told her I was an orphan. I told her that story I always tell, that I remember when I was four or five years old my father used to tie me up in a blanket and throw me over his shoulder and go for a walk. I’d peer out at the world... people would say, “What have you got in that sack?” And my father would answer, “My fortune.” Women always like that story.

When she got too excited, she tried to hold us both back, literally dragging me back by my hair, my shoulders, finger by finger, to slow us down. Also, she had a way of suddenly opening her eyes and looking right at me when something good was happening. I noticed all the things about her that made her different, and I began to find out how to make them happen. And I knew that Screwbosky must have noticed, too, and worked at it, too.

It is a point of pride with me to do this well. Anybody who does something really well tends never to do it less than well. That’s one reason I finish so little. If it’s not going well, I won’t do it.

She kept her eyes closed a lot of the time. I guess to concentrate on what she was feeling. I began to stroke inside, moving easily and deep. Her legs flew apart then, and she flew apart inside, too, opening in front of me and I followed, moving past bands of flesh and rings like chine into a snug space beyond. I can do this... oh, about five or six minutes before I have to shift to something else.

With my hands, I stroked her thighs along the outside, and directed her by touch to press her legs together under me, so that she would grasp me as tightly as possible. Her flesh moved with me as I moved, the outer membrane sliding with me, the deeper flesh less yielding, and then meeting the blank warmth of that far wall. I took her head between my hands and turned her face up to mine. I kissed her until she fought for breath, and finally we both moaned, open-mouthed, and I felt a thrill of pleasure shake my ass, as rare a thing for me as completing one of my designs. Rarer.

And yet, when it was over, she sat on the frame of the waterbed and dressed herself, pantyhose and pleated skirt, and a shirt with a ribbon at the neck. I wanted her to lie down and talk for a while. I wanted to question her about Screwbosky. She had glanced at the poster, passing through the living room, but had made no comment. I wanted to ask her if she had ever suggested any words to Screwbosky for a song, and if so which ones they were. I wanted to ask if he was as tall as I am. If he was as good in bed.

But she was combing her hair, and already thinking ahead, of the trip across town, of the train, of dinner; as far as I was concerned, she was already taking the roast from the oven. I pulled her back over onto the bed. I didn’t care whether she went or stayed, but why couldn’t she stay for a few minutes? She stretched out next to me. I jiggled the waterbed. I once saw someone put a baby on its back on a hard surface, and it lost its equilibrium in the same way. She adjusted her body with little jerks. “Come back on Monday,” I said.

“Monday...” She really had not thought ahead to another meeting.

I could see that she had thought this was just a lucky fuck — no consequences, no guilt, no connection at all to her life. But now that she did think of going to bed with me again, her eyes narrowed on her calendar, probably stamped with the name of a suburban bank and hanging with the train schedule beside the wall telephone in her kitchen.

“Monday,” I said.

“Ohhh, Monday’s too hard. Getting the girls off to swimming lessons, getting the week started...”

“It has to be Monday. You want it to be Monday too.”

She drew up in bed and sat with her arms wrapped around herself, her face partly hidden by her hair.

I pulled at the strand of hair until she bent her head. Then I kissed her and caught her lip between my teeth. “Come on Monday,” I said. She struggled away, making a great wave in the water-bed that rocked us to and fro.

The apartment looked so good that after she left I decided to stay in. I did a little more cleaning and then I started fooling around with both tape recorders. I played Sophie’s message again, pushing the Pause button and running the tape backward and forward as I fit my side of the conversation onto the new tape.

“Peter?”

“Sophie, you old douche bag, how are you?”

“Peter, why don’t you answer your telephone?”

“I’m too busy jerking off, Ma.”

“On Mondays I go to see Father Stephanotis.”

“That faggot! He’ll never lift his cassock for you, Ma. You’re wasting your time.”

“He says, Peter is such a fine-looking young man.”

“I bet he does. But I’m saving it for the women, Ma.”

“They don’t know how to say no to you.”

“You’re right, Ma. They don’t. Such a cock.”

“And such a brain.”

“I agree.”

“I am only a mother—”

“That’s right, Sophie, you little dumpling. Only a mother. And don’t you forget it.”

“That first Christmas, I actually tried to send Christmas cards, Tiffany Christmas cards embossed with our names. Our formal names, Mr. and Mrs., then I signed them, Storey and Screw. It sounds silly now. I was trying to have a marriage, you know. Be married. I kept after Screw to give me his list. I finally discovered that he didn’t know most of his friends’ last names, and had no idea where they lived. They mostly got together when it was time to go on the road, or they ran into each other at coffee houses and clubs, or at the studio. The only people whose addresses and phone numbers he knew were his agent, his manager, his lawyer, and his producer.

“Everybody always knew where to find Screw,” she added. We were camping on the living room floor. The waterbed was leaking again. I had my sleeping bag unfolded and spread out, so there was plenty of room. I was stretched out on my back, Storey was sitting up with her arms around her knees, a favorite position of hers. I had both pillows, and an ashtray on my chest with a joint. We kept lighting it and taking a hit and putting it out again.

Along the edge of the sleeping bag were the remains of breakfast. Storey had gone around by Murray’s for bagels and cream cheese and smoked fish, and somewhere along the way she had picked up orange juice and champagne. That was all right. That was sweet of her, although I don’t really like people giving me things unless it’s something I specifically want.

While she talked about Screwbosky, I looked up at the poster. I kept putting his records on, playing a cut here and a cut there, sometimes a whole album. I was trying to make it seem that he was there with us, that there were three of us, but it wasn’t working. Somehow the things she was telling me were not what I expected. She seemed to remember the most inconsequential things. And not to remember big things at all. She didn’t remember the first time she heard “Right of Way.” Imagine not remembering the first time you heard it. I remember the first time I heard it.

“We were living on the third floor of a brownstone in the West Village,” she was saying. “It was nice. Small. But it had a lot of charm. There was a garden below, at the back, with a brick wall around it. Our apartment looked down into the garden. Screw’s fans used to hang around in the alley, on the other side of the wall. They used to jump up and catch the top of the wall and try to look over. They’d hang there until their arms got tired, then they’d drop back to the sidewalk. Sometimes I’d look down and see just their fingers showing on the top of the wall.”

“How did you meet him?”

“It was between semesters at Radcliffe. I was doing an internship at a theater in the city. I was getting credit, no pay. It was one of those improvisational theaters, where the audience takes part, so the performance is different every night. Screw came in several times. He thought that he was doing something similar at his concerts. There were times when he wanted to control his audience, and times when he wanted to turn it loose. He was studying the actors’ techniques, and talking with the director. I met him there.”

“And you started going out with him?”

“Um-hmmm.”

“And?”

“And we got married.”

“How long?”

“Two years... two and a half.”

“How come you broke up?”

“He didn’t want to be married anymore. I wanted to be married, but not to him. I wanted to be married to a businessman, a lawyer, a doctor, anybody but a rock musician. I wanted a house in the suburbs. I wanted children. I thought I was wasting my time in that life, and not having any of the things I wanted.”

“Maybe you just weren’t his type,” I suggested.

She looked at me for a moment. “But I was. Every woman he had after me was just like me. The girl he was married to when he died — she was a Sarah Lawrence film student, and her father’s a vice president at IBM.”

I wondered if she had been much different fifteen years ago. Of course she had. Her hair had been paler and longer probably. She’d probably been thinner, or thin in a different way. She must have been narrower across the shoulders too. Now she had that band of muscle across her back that comes from carrying a couple of kids around. I wondered if she’d been more talkative then, more fun. She seemed to me to be always preoccupied, always thinking of all the things she had to do. She came in once, twice a week; but she always seemed to be thinking about making it home before school was out or phoning Connecticut to see if the man was going to fix the clothes dryer. All those details drove me crazy — she could never just forget about them and listen to me. Only when we were making love would she concentrate on me. Then I would realize — this is what she came for. I tried to play some of my own tapes for her, but she just waited politely through them until it was time to crawl into the sack. I even played part of my father’s funeral eulogy for her, not the part Sophia doesn’t like, but the part where Father Stephanotis says he was a pillar of the Greek community in New York. All she said was, “I thought your father was a Russian émigré.”

That brought me up short. Reminded me, once again, to decide what I’m going to do with these tapes. At one time, I thought I’d use them, turn them into an art form of some kind. One idea was to build a gigantic 1930s kind of radio cabinet, the kind that looks like it has an art deco face, with all the cabinetry and wood veneers done just right, and play the tapes through it, in a big empty gallery, in a big white room like a squash court, with a dim orange light coming from the radio dial. Now, I don’t know. If I ever have to leave this apartment, I might just dump all the tapes in the trash cans up and down Columbus Avenue. I might mail them to some body. They could be evidence. Of what? I don’t know. I’ve taped and retaped and messed around with them so much, nobody could reconstruct the originals.

“Tell me about the concerts,” I said. I wanted to hear something. I mean, he was somebody. He had talent, he had money. He was a big star. She must remember all that. “What were the concerts like?”

“I didn’t see a lot. I never liked going on the road. There was nothing for me to do, and the hotels and motels... I never liked that part. Screw didn’t like to take me on a tour, either; being married didn’t go with touring. I think Screw wanted me to stay at home and keep things organized, and take care of him when he was there.”

“Sounds great,” I said.

“Well, he did want a home, and in some ways I succeeded in giving him the things he wanted.”

“Like...?”

“I think I introduced him to a lot of things, taught him something about food, although he still wanted the kitchen stocked with the kinds of junk food he always wanted when he was high.”

I guess it doesn’t work to hear ordinary things about him while his songs are playing on the stereo. I wasn’t sorry I had decided not to try to tape what she was saying that day. I could have set up the big tape recorder behind the speakers and she would not have seen that it was running. But then I couldn’t have played the albums, and I wanted to listen to them while she was there.

The week before, I did get her to tell me one interesting thing about Screw, and I was taping at the time. I asked her if she had ever inspired any of his songs. Here, I’ll play that section into this tape. I’ll probably get rid of the original with the rest of the junk, but this bit is worth saving. Listen.

“He used to make me tell him my dreams, in case there was something he could use. He said people were only truly original in dreams.”

There. For those three digits I ran two hours of tape.

I crawled over the sleeping bag and put on another album. I kept hoping maybe some of the songs would remind her of something, bring back some kind of painful scene that she would suddenly begin to tell me about.

“Ironed sheets.”

“What?”

“Not the no-iron synthetic sheets, but real sheets that had to be ironed. He loved them. He would snap one over us and then smooth it around us. I can still remember...”

“Were you with him in Chicago? March of 1983?”

“No. I was back in school by then, at Barnard, trying to finish my last year. But I went with him to London that summer.”

“Oh, God, you were at the Wembley Stadium concert.” I started looking for my tape of Live at Wembley.

“Yes. We had a lovely time in London. We went to Harrods. We bought absolutely everything. Everything we saw that we wanted, everything that was perishable or eatable or wearable, we had it all sent to the hotel. But in one whole year that was the only thing we really did together.”

“And now he’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“It could happen to any of us. Any moment.”

She smiled, and I thought she wasn’t listening to me, but she explained why she was smiling. She didn’t think it could happen to her.

“Last week after I met you at the museum — wasn’t it Tuesday? I was crossing Park Avenue, on my way to Grand Central to get the three-thirty-five, and I got caught by the light and barely made it across the street, and I was thinking how awful if I were struck down on my way home from meeting you. And then I thought I couldn’t possibly die like that since I had to get home to pick up the kids at the orthodontist’s.”

“Like insurance? As long as you’re covered, nothing’s going to happen.”

“Right. As long as I have to get their breakfasts, patch their jeans, and show up at tennis camp on parents’ day, nothing very terrible can happen to me.”

“You really believe that,” I told her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I appreciate what I’ve got. I wouldn’t like to lose it. The mornings seem awfully nice to me, all of a sudden. This past week... calling the kids for breakfast, watching them pick the raisins out of their sticky buns... then that panic at eight-thirty when it’s time to leave for school, the search for ponytail holders and schoolbooks, and the odd sums of money they need at the last minute for field trips and library fines. I do like all that.”

“Then why are you here with me?”

“Well, because. I’m afraid of getting old and then wishing I’d done more, lived more. Don’t you find that you never regret the things you’ve done, only the things you’ve failed to do? When I get old, sitting in my rocking chair, I don’t want to be sorry. And I’m here because I’ve always wanted to know something about myself. I just wanted to know. Now I do. I owe you for that. I’ve never lived the way I’ve lived in the past few weeks. It’s very good, as you must know.” As she talked, her hands were moving over me, eating at me with wonderful scoops. I pulled her over me, and we went at it again.

I crawled off the sleeping bag again and put on Blown. A studio album. Lots of craftsmanship, lots of painstaking construction. The title, like the best of Screw’s work, illustrated his gift for ambiguity. I don’t know how many ways that tide can be read. Blown away, dead. Blown by a blowjob. Driven by the wind. Out of breath. Blos-somed-blown. Blowing-it blown. I never knew that I was attracted to ambiguity — Christ, that I loved ambiguity — until Screw. And the vocal.

“Listen to this,” I said to Storey, as if she hadn’t heard it before. Against the technical perfections, he pitched a vocal sound with an energy that came from rage.

It’s much better to listen to this album high. You can listen harder. “You want some hash?” I asked Storey. I had some on my desk somewhere in a twist of aluminum foil. A customer had laid it on my dash instead of a tip.

She nodded and I got up and foraged around until I found a cardboard cylinder from a roll of toilet paper and a straight pin. I took it back to the sleeping bag. Storey watched me cut a penny-size hole on the side of the cardboard roll, shape a little piece of foil over it, stick some pinprick holes in it, and set a lump of hash into the little depression over the hole. I showed her how to put her palm on the end of the roll and wait until the cylinder filled with smoke, then inhale the whole cool tube of smoke from the other end.

“You know what I like about us?” she asked.

I stirred uneasily. Who was she talking about? Us? There was no us. “What?” I asked.

“We do such simple things. We do simple things for pleasure. We never talk about money. We never exchange all those money signals, key words, brand names. Everybody else talks about money. We never spend money, either, have you noticed? We don’t even buy a token, we walk everywhere.”

“Yeah, you’re a cheap date,” I laughed.

“My house is so full of possessions, and I spend so much time cleaning and sorting and maintaining them, sometimes I feel like some sort of suburban shopping bag lady.”

“That’s what you wanted, Mrs. Talbot,” I reminded her.

“Yes,” she said. She lay still for a while, gazing up at the ceiling, her hands pillowing her head. “Listen... I can’t come in next week.”

“Why not?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. The girls are going off to tennis camp. There’s a lot to do to get ready. Then on the weekend we’re going to drive them up to Maine. Stay overnight. It’s a big deal. You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, it is.”

“If you can’t make it into town, maybe I’ll come out to Connecticut.”

She turned her head and looked at me. There was such a look of surprise in her eyes. The idea had never occurred to her.

“Let George drive the kids to camp. You stay home. I’ll come out for the weekend.”

“Nooo...” she breathed.

“Why not? Why not, why not?”

“It just wouldn’t work.”

“It wouldn’t do to intrude on your real life, is that it?”

“Nick, don’t do it. Please don’t come to Connecticut.”

“There’s no reason why I shouldn’t. It has nothing to do with you, as a matter of fact. I have connections there. I have to see Doug about some materials for the kitchen. I know where he can get some slate, but I have to do some measuring to get an estimate.” She was quiet for a while. “I won’t be there,” she said finally.

“That’s OK, lady. I have a real life too.”

She looked at me. She took one hand from behind her head and reached over to me, stroking my shoulder. “Don’t do this,” she said.

“Don’t you do this,” I replied. She was the one who started it. I realized now that she had come today to say this — that she wouldn’t be here next week. I rolled over and wrapped myself around her, she was lying straight and still, with me curling around her — something like the photo of John Lennon with Yoko on Rolling Stone, if you remember that cover. She began to put her fingers through my hair, in a soothing kind of way, but I twisted my head away, I didn’t want it. I kissed her eyes and her neck. Then I lowered my head and fastened onto her breast. I felt her settle patiently, as she must have for her children, waiting for the tension in the jaw to slacken with a small shudder and the greedy mouth to let go. Gradually she began to realize that I would not let go; nothing would make me let go. I felt her stomach contract, her nipple cautiously trying to remove itself, trying to slide through my teeth. “Nicholai!” she whispered. “Let me go.” I lay like a deadweight. I was covering her everywhere, I could feel the tension everywhere, if she were on her feet she would be running. But her breast didn’t move. The muscles in her shoulders bunched, but the breast held still. Was she thinking about me now at last? Me, Nicholai, son of aristocratic Russian émigrés? Me, Peter, spoiled son of a Greek shopkeeper? Or the me that Douglas Miller picked up at a SoHo party and who can’t find quite the right bribe... “Nick, please,” she said. “Let me go. I’ll see. About the weekend. I’ll see what I can do. Let me go.” And then, of course, I did. I put my hands on her hips and turned her so that she lay facing me. I pressed my thumbs into the hollows in front of the hipbone. Then I pulled myself over her and began to fuck. A bed adds a lot of resiliency to fucking. A bed sinks, bounces. Goes along with the flesh. On the floor, everything is harder. Everything resists more. Sometimes the floor is exactly hard enough. It is exactly what you want

I thought about the way Screwbosky defused sex by letting people call him by his nickname. When you’d hear the crowd yelling it, cheering it, it became more a name than a word. “Screw! You!” people would shout at concerts. I’d think about that sometimes when I was in bed with someone. Think about him, or think his name, Screw! Screw! in the rhythm of what I was doing.

I relaxed my grip and she got to her knees and then to her feet and took a couple of steps across the room. She just made it to the wall, where she leaned against it, her forehead and palms and one hip resting against it as if it was softer than the floor; I really loved her then, looking at her back, but I realized it was a kind of pity. I had to feel pity for her before I could feel the love. Against the wall, she was full of grace and desperation; I could have watched her forever. She ground against the wall, turning slowly to look at me, and her fingers caught the edge of the poster. She tore a long strip from the lower half. Actually it improved the poster, improved its relationship to the wall. It looked better now.

I jerked my hips in her direction. “You don’t like it?” I asked.

“Not like that.”

“Look, if you only like the things about me that give you pleasure, you’re in trouble.”

Later I realized that I was taking a chance, saying something like that to her, something that was absolutely true. But I find it works out OK to tell the absolute truth some of the time. It adds something to the whole project. For both people. I thought I’d explain that to Storey when I went out to Connecticut to talk to her about our relationship.

The relationship I had with Douglas Miller was based on his assumption that he was under obligation to me. He wasn’t actually. What happened was that the first time we met was at a big loft party downtown on a Friday night, where there were a lot of fantastic people and even a few who were famous. Doug was out of his element, not having a very good time, but content to be there staring at everybody.

He had seated himself in a chair of regal proportions in the middle of the room, which was not helping him any. I watched him for a while, then went over and sat on the floor, my back straight against one carved leg of the chair as if I was chained there, the back of my head almost touching his hand, which rested on the chair’s ornate arm. Now he looked interesting. All through the evening, people came over and talked to us and then walked away. It was like holding court. People approached, exchanged a few words, and gave place to the next courtier. It was a little trick that just happened to work, but Doug went on thinking I could do that anytime I wanted to. He thought that anytime I chose, I could turn anything into an occasion. That if I didn’t, it was because I was mad or bored or stubborn.

So when I turned up at Perth Island, in the middle of his renovations, with piles of sand and gravel spoiling his lawn, he was not inhospitable. He was more discomfited by the fact that I had driven out in the cab. Nobody ever saw a taxi on Perth Island, except for the occasional Darien town taxi that ferried guests over from the train station. But mine was yellow, a real taxi. I obligingly stashed it in his garage, out of sight.

I would have to make up the mileage to Mike out of my own pocket. He was going to be mad when I didn’t bring it back to the barn tonight. I’ll be surprised if he ever lets me take it out again. He’s tired of putting himself out for me, I can tell.

After I parked the cab, I looked around the main floor of Doug’s house and told him it was coming along fine. It was. Most of the older houses there were bungalows and fishing camps built along the shore around the turn of the century. They are still unassuming to look at, with their odd shapes and shingled upper stories, but on the inside many of them have been elaborately remodeled. Doug was putting in a glass wall on the west, facing over the marsh and catching a sail’s worth of the Sound to the south. I told Douglas that he’d be getting a great view.

“I’m going to go for a walk on the beach,” I said. “Just needed to get out of town, unwind for a couple of hours.”

“Suit yourself, Nick. Come back up for a beer later.”

“Sure,” I said.

I walked over to East Beach and took off my shoes and rolled up my jeans and walked back and forth at the waterline for a while, looking for shells or whatever the tide had brought in. Then I went over to the sea wall and sat there, leaning against a stone pillar, perfectly content to watch the small boats offshore, swinging on their anchors like weather vanes.

It wasn’t long before I saw them. I figured she and the little girls — she had two — would walk along the beach one more time before the kids went away to camp. Sure enough, I heard a door bang along the edge of the low cliff that rose from the beach, and two skinny little girls, blond and suntanned, came scuffing along in their flip-flops, with Storey right behind them. When they reached the beach, they turned down the other way, where there’s a long walk before the beach ends at Rocky Point. I jumped off the sea wall and walked in their footprints, but faster.

When I came up behind her, I said hello, in the warmest way I could. I didn’t want to alarm her, or announce my presence in some awkward way. She cut her eyes around at me and they almost rolled in her head — for a moment I could see only the whites of her eyes.

She took a few fast steps and her hands shot out and grabbed her kids’ necks, not hard, but one hand on each. I could see the strength in her hands, and I knew how they felt on the backs of those little flower-stalk necks.

“Hi,” I said to the kids. “I hear today’s the big day. You’re taking off for camp.” They looked a little confused, wondering who I was and how I knew about them. But polite. They said yes, and that they couldn’t wait; the younger one, the anxious one, said to Storey, “Mommy, did you pack my box of stationery? And Mille Bournes? And two bathing suits, two?”

“You’re all packed,” Storey assured her. “Now, let’s get down to the Point and back. Pick up a stone along the way to leave at Rocky Point.” They took off, walking down the beach like storks, their long skinny legs joined at bony knees so articulated they looked as if they’d bend either way. Maybe they were at an awkward age. “How old are they?” I asked.

“Pick a stone!” she called behind them. “It’s part of our beach-clearing project,” she explained to me. See how she’s always thinking about something else? Women like that are responsible for gravity. If they ever let up, we’ll all go streaming off the earth, like dandelion seeds. “Seven and nine,” she said. “Lizzie’s nine. The other one is Cora.”

We walked along silently, in the same direction as the children, watching them grow smaller ahead of us. “We’re leaving right after lunch,” she said. “We’re planning to drive to Bangor and spend the night, and then take the girls over to the camp tomorrow morning. We’ll be back home sometime tomorrow evening.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“It will have to wait.”

“It won’t wait. We have to talk.”

“It’s not fair to pressure me like this. This is not the way to do it.”

I felt like pointing out that it was going to work, but I decided to wait and let her see for herself. She sighed. “I’ll come in to New York on Tuesday. Monday, even. Day after tomorrow. Can’t it wait until then?”

I was silent, matching my pace to hers exactly. The sand was wet and took our footprints in deep impressions.

“Please, Nick!”

“Tell him you have a headache and can’t go. It’s too late to change all the plans now. He’ll drive the kids up to camp. I’ll come over later. We’ll have a drink. We’ll sit down and talk. We’ll have plenty of time, no pressure.”

She sighed again.

“You want them to get off to camp, don’t you?”

She nodded. I could almost see her thinking of the packed foot-lockers. They were all ready to go.

“Or I could come over now—”

“No,” she said. “No. I’ll try to stay. We’ll talk.” She was silent for a moment. “I want to talk to you,” she said. Ahead of us, the girls came to a halt and pinged their rocks onto the Point, where they rattled over the boulders and sent the gulls cawing into the air.

“Nick, could you go before they get back?”

I hated her for saying that. The kids had accepted me as a friend of hers. She didn’t like that. She hated it. She would like it if no one but Storey knew of my existence.

“I’ll see you later,” I said, and touched her shoulder. She froze. You’d think I’d never touched her before, never done the things she had so willingly let me do. “Later,” I repeated, loudly, and she managed to nod. Then she walked forward to meet the children, not looking back.

I was over at the bridge when they left. It was late in the afternoon. I guess they didn’t get away as early as they had expected to. Maybe they waited to see if Storey’s headache would go away.

I was watching about a dozen people, mostly kids, fish for shiners from the rocks below the bridge. It was high tide, and the little bay was so full that the grasses along the edge were drowning. The Land Rover was packed to the roof, and two bright faces in the front seat pressed against the window to watch the fishing while George slowed for the bump on the arch of the bridge. I stayed there for a while, leaning on the parapet and watching the activity. Then I walked over to Storey’s house.

When you enter the house from the lane, you find yourself on the middle level, entering through the kitchen. On this side, it was a two-story house, with an old-fashioned gabled roof. On the opposite side, where the cliff drops down to the beach, it was three stories high. Each level had a deck — a wooden porch, really — with a railing around it and a wooden staircase going down. Storey let me look around while she was making coffee.

I really looked around, even going down to the basement, which was partly a garage and partly a workroom and storage area. George had stored the storm windows on the rafters up near the ceiling. Metal shelving along the walls held neatly labeled boxes, and a large sheet of pegboard displayed an assortment of tools. I had to admire George. Over near the doors that opened onto a paved area, there was a small Sunfish with its sail leaning against the wall and various beach chairs, floats, water toys, and life preservers.

Upstairs, I prowled around the dining room, reconstructing lunch from the remains on the table. One of the kids, probably Cora, had left nearly a whole plateful of food, partly hidden under a piece of toast. There was cold coffee in two yellow cups.

Storey was clinking away in the kitchen. She put a whole pot of coffee on a silver tray. The cups had saucers, and the milk was in a little crystal pitcher. She couldn’t help making it attractive, I suppose. She couldn’t help making domesticity seem worth the effort. She called out, asking me to come and take the tray into the living room. “Do you want something to eat?”

“No, just coffee,” I said. “Come on, I’m pouring yours.”

She came in and sat at a little writing desk, leaning on an elbow, stirring her cup.

“Nick,” she said, and I waited. “Nick?” she asked. “Have I been unfair to you?” And then I knew she was about to be.

“We went out to dinner the other night,” she went on. “Not really out, just here on the island. A dinner party. I was sitting next to a man, I think he’s a stockbroker. Something on Wall Street. He talked to me at the dinner table, not about anything in particular, and then he suddenly said, ‘You look like you’re about to bolt. Are you a bolter?’ ”

“And I said No. No, no, no, you’ve got me all wrong. I’m not a bolter. And I’m not, Nick. I’m going to stay here, I’m going to stick with what I’ve got, and I’m not going to see you again.”

“We’re just going into another phase,” I told her. “I feel it too. At first I just wanted to hear about Screwbosky, learn all I could about him. Now I want...”

“I know what you want,” she said, looking around the room, which was beginning to grow dark. “But there’s no place for you. There’s no way you can come into my life. I never wanted that.” She rubbed her head, as if she really had a headache.

“I thought about what you said, the last time I saw you in town. That I like only the things about you that gave me pleasure. When I got home that night, when I was getting ready to have my bath and go to bed, I took off my clothes and your smell rose up around me on the air. I thought to myself, it’s true, I do like only the things about him that give me pleasure. Why else would I lie in bed with a neurotic boy?”

She looked at me apologetically and I stared back at her.

“I know you think that I was just taking, not giving. I’m sorry for that. But there’s nothing more I can do.”

“This is good,” I said. “This is very good. We’re communicating. Go on. Go on talking. We’re talking about us now, I think it’s an improvement.”

She frowned at me, beginning to be a little angry. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Listen to what I’m saying, Nick.”

“I’m not your child.”

“Can you just listen to me quietly for a minute, and then—”

“I’m not your child.”

She met my eyes finally. “I know,” she said.

I laughed when I saw the beds. I didn’t know anybody who had twin beds. I pulled the covers off her bed and put us both in. The bedroom was dim, and the moon was just coming up over the water. I jumped up and opened the doors that led out onto the upper deck and let the evening air flow in. Every now and then I looked over at George’s bed, as if he might be there quietly asleep, unnoticed.

“Isn’t this nice?” I asked her. “Isn’t it good? Isn’t it worth it?”

She did not reply, but her hands slid over me, carving me up, pulling me together.

When it was over, and after her tears had dried, she said, “That’s the last time.”

“No,” I said.

“But it was good. I want to be honest with you. It was good. I loved it.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “It doesn’t have to stop. I won’t let it.” I didn’t say that as a threat, but she look it as one.

“Please don’t cause trouble,” she begged.

I grinned at her. If only she knew what a talent I have for causing trouble. It was a gift, almost. “Be reasonable and I won’t,” I said.

She was thoughtful. “I calculated the price I might have to pay for this... this adventure. It’s high, but I can do it. If things are going to be unpleasant, awkward, I’m ready for it. Even if things become painful, I’ve figured that in too. But there’s a point beyond which I won’t go. You might as well know that now. That’s why I stayed behind, to talk to you. The best thing is to end it now, while we can still be civil. While we can still be friends.”

“We’re not friends,” I told her. “We’re lovers. None of my friends are frustrated housewives.”

She threw off the covers, exasperated. She walked to a closet and reached in blindly. She must have recognized what she was looking for by touch alone; she pulled out a dressing gown and put it on, knotting the sash tightly. “I’m going to make some more coffee,” she said briskly, “and then we’ll see about getting you to the train station. Come down when you’re dressed.”

She walked out, and I listened to her steps fading down the stairs. Bitch, I thought. I didn’t get up immediately. I arranged the pillows under my head and watched the moon. I decided I liked it here. I wondered if I could drive George out of his wee little neat bed. I looked across at it. There was a night table between, with a lamp and a telephone extension on it. There was a lambskin rug between the beds, curling like waves in a channel. I wondered how often George crossed that moat.

The phone rang then. I could hear its echo downstairs. Without waiting for a second ring, I picked up the receiver. “Hello!” I said. “Hello?”

If only I had it on tape. By now Storey had picked up the downstairs phone, and we were all on the line.

“Is this George?” I interrupted him. “Did you get there all right? No trouble on the road? Did you—”

I was drowned out by a babble in my ear, Storey and George both talking at once. I replaced the receiver gently and left them to it.

Minutes later I heard her step on the stairs again. Her dressing gown made loud slithers of sound as she whirled through the door. I couldn’t see her face, but I imagined that she had gone white with rage; as she talked, I could hear her teeth striking as her jaws snapped on her words.

“Get out of my house.”

I lay still. It is always easy for me to stay calm when other people are angry.

“You have gone beyond any limits I recognize. Get out. Now, this minute. I have never been more serious in my life.”

When she saw that I was not listening to her, she began to fling herself around the room, jerking open drawers and throwing things around in the closet.

“You haven’t even told me how Screw died,” I told her.

“He just died. That’s all, he just died!”

“Nobody just dies. He was thirty-one years old, for God’s sake. How did he die?”

“If I tell you, will you get out?”

I lay back with my arms behind my head, waiting.

“He got meningitis. He went to Europe, and he got meningitis. His fever was a hundred and five. He just got sick and died.”

I lay still.

“I’ve told you. Now get out of here.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“If you won’t leave, I will,” she said, and left the room with her clothes under her arm.

I hoped she wasn’t going to call in the cops. I reached over and took the telephone off the hook and laid it down on the night table.

The house was quiet. Reluctantly, I climbed out of bed and got dressed. I had wanted to stay the night. I opened the bedroom door and walked down the hall, passing the rooms that belonged to the children. It was quiet as a tomb, but I could imagine them there — Lizzie, the one Storey says never sleeps, with her transistor radio to her ear, and Cora, in the next room, grinding her teeth in her sleep.

Downstairs I heard a door open and close. Was it someone going out or coming in?

I retreated to the bedroom and let myself out onto the deck. From here I could simply descend to the beach and walk away. But I waited to see who was in the house.

I stood in the cool night air and peered in through the glass pane. The bedroom door opened slowly and spilled some light from the hall across the carpet. Douglas came creeping into the room like a blind mole. Doug! Of all people for Storey to summon to her rescue. Doug was about the most ineffectual soul she could have picked. I whistled at him, and he jumped as if he’d been prodded.

He came over to the door and looked out. “Nick?” he whispered.

“What do you want, Doug? Why don’t you go home and send Storey back over here? Stay out of it.”

“Nick, what in God’s name are you up to? You’re spoiling things for me, I can tell you that. You’re going to ruin me.”

“What will the neighbors say?” I asked mockingly.

“Now, come along,” he said, reaching for me. He grabbed for my shoulder and got a piece of shirt, which he began to twist. I never liked him touching me.

I hit him on the jaw first and then buried my fist in his belly. He wasn’t in shape, so that was enough. He staggered over to the railing and caught himself on it, retching to recover the breath I had driven out. “Take it easy, Doug,” I advised him. I went down the outside staircase, to avoid going through the lighted house.

As I was starting down the second flight of stairs, Doug passed me. If I had blinked I would not have seen him. He fell like a diver. He must have leaned too heavily on the railing, lost his balance, and flowed over. He made no sound as he fell, but he did make a sound when he landed on the terrace below. I was passing the living room level. I peered into the room, where one lamp was lit, but it was empty. I went on down to the bottom. Doug lay in a dark heap. I went over to him and felt around. I couldn’t feel any movement in his chest. I lifted his head and touched the back of it. My fingers went through his hair and seemed to keep going. I thought his hair was damp and his head was soft. I didn’t think a head should feel that way. I reached up to feel my own scalp for comparison, and my fingers were tacky with wet. I’d stayed long enough, I decided. Things were getting messy. I wasn’t in control anymore. I didn’t even want to be. Enough is enough.

I walked along the side of the house to the alley, and then through the narrow lanes to Doug’s house.

Storey sat in a straight chair, her hands clenched on the table in front of her. She was staring sightlessly at one of Doug’s awful oil paintings. I could see her through the unfinished window that would have given Doug one of the best views on the island. In a few minutes, I thought, she’ll realize how long Doug’s been gone. She’ll walk over to her house to see what is going on. How in the hell is she going to explain the events of the night? Jesus, George may think it was Doug who answered the phone! It was a mess, all right. And the ironic thing was that I would probably never even know how it all turned out.

I opened the garage doors quietly. I opened the door to the cab, but I didn’t get in. I released the brakes and put the gears in neutral and pushed the car out of the garage and was a few yards down the street before I jumped in and started the motor. Fifteen minutes later I was on the New England Thruway, heading for Manhattan.

There was not much traffic, and the drive calmed me down. I was still angry, of course. I should never have let Storey get under my skin like that. I should never have wanted anything from her. All I wanted, really, was some information. I am thinking of getting into music myself, the production end of it. And old Doug. Doug had always been dispensable. Now another suburban type would move in and start yet another remodeling job on Doug’s new house.

A little past Stamford, I drew even with a Chevrolet in the lane on my right. There was enough illumination from the dashboard to see the occupant. It was a woman. Pretty, as far as I could see, and completely absorbed in the road ahead. She was driving with one hand. The other hand was out of sight, buried in the V of her shirt. I watched her for a while, turning my head from the highway to the other car, keeping a steady speed. I suddenly figured out what she was doing. Examining the right quadrant, the left quadrant, checking the crinkly flesh around the aureole. She was doing a routine breast check, just like she’d been taught or read in a manual or saw on TV. I laughed when I’d figured it out. I tried to catch her eye, to give her the old thumbs-up signal, encouraging, but traffic was picking up and I couldn’t stay even with her car. I’ve always liked women like her — softening up a little, allowing themselves a sag here and there, of the flesh, of the spirit. They’re more touching then. If I could have caught her eye, I bet I could have got her to pull over, after we got off the highway, and go with me for a drink. But it’s probably a good thing I didn’t make contact, because I had to get home and get my stuff cleared out.

As soon as I got to my apartment, I listened to my machine for messages. There was nothing important. If Sophie had called, she had not left a message. I retaped my recorded greeting.

“Hello. This is the telephone butler at 736-9780. Is this by any chance Peter’s mother? He has left a message for you. He may want to sleep at home tonight. Could you move those boxes out of his old room for him? Thank you.”

I rewound the tape. I’ll leave it set up while I pack, then I’ll take the machine with me. I paid good money for that.

I’m going to dump all the tapes into a plastic garbage bag. All these tapes have to go. I’ve got one tape of Storey; that’s going too. The tape that’s on now — well, I can do several things with it, can’t I? I can erase it — just run it through the machine with the Record button on. I can mail it to Storey, she could probably use it to clear her fair name. Or I can leave it here for the police to find, after she tells them where to look for me. It’s like a confession, after all, isn’t it? Although I don’t know whether it could be used in court. Wouldn’t it be like self-incrimination? A violation of my civil rights?

Or I can dump it in the trash tonight, along with everything else that has my real name on it, and everything connecting me with Nicholai. Son of Russian émigrés. Artist and lover.