The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

Foes

bake mckurty was no stranger to the parasitic mixings of art and commerce, literature and the rich. "Hedge funds and haiku!" he'd exclaimed to his wife, Suzy — and yet such mixings seemed never to lose their swift, stark capacity to appall. The hustle for money met the hustle for virtue and everyone washed their hands in one another. It was a common enough thing, though was there ever enough soap to cut the grease? "That's what your lemon is for," Suzy would say, pointing at the twist in the martini he was not supposed to drink. Still, now and again, looking up between the crabmeat cocktail and the palate-cleansing sorbet sprinkled with, say, fennel pollen dust, he felt shocked by the whole thing.

"It's symbiosis," said Suzy as they were getting dressed to go. "Think of it being like the krill that grooms and sees for the rock shrimp. Or that bird who picks out the bugs from the rhino hide."

"So we're the seeing-eye krill," he said.

"Yes!"

"We're the oxpeckers."

"Well, I wasn't going to say that," she said.

"A lot in this world has to do with bugs," said Bake.

"Food," she said. "A lot has to do with grooming and food. Are you wearing that?"

"What's wrong with it?"

"Lose the — what are those?"

"Suspenders."

"They're red."

"OK, OK. But you know, I never do that to you."

"I'm the sighted krill," she said. She smoothed his hair, which had recently become a weird pom-pom of silver and maize.

"And I'm the blind boy?"

"Well, I wasn't going to say that either."

"You look good. Whatever it is your wearing. See? I say nice things to you!"

"It's a sarong." She tugged it up a little.

He ripped off the suspenders. "Well, here. You may need these."

they were staying at a Georgetown B and B to save a little money, a townhouse where the owner-couple left warm cookies at everyone's door at night to compensate for their loud toddler who by six a.m. was barking orders and pointing at her mother to fetch this toy or that. After a day of sightseeing (all those museums pre-paid with income taxes; it was like being philanthropists come to investigate the look of their own money) Suzy and Bake were already tired. They had come back early for a pre-dinner lie-down. "Tea and crumpets," suggested Bake.

"Crumpets?" Propped up on the bed with her elbow, Suzy had given him a look of cartoon seduction, one leg sprung shakily into the air.

"Grumpets?" said Bake "I'm too old for crumpets." Did all attraction lead to comedy — without exactly arriving? Did every marriage degenerate into vaudeville?

When they were ready to leave for the evening, they hailed a cab and recited the fundraiser's address to the cabbie who nodded and said ominously, "Oh, yes."

never mind good taste, here at this gala even the usual diaphanous veneer of seemliness had been tossed to the trade winds. Voodoo economics had become doo-doo economics, noted Bake. The fundraiser for Lunar Lines Literary Journal—3LJ as it was known to its readers and contributors; "the magazine" as it was known to its staff, as if there were no others — was being held in a bank. Or at least a former bank, one which had recently gone under, and which now sold squid-ink orchietti beneath its vaulted ceilings, and martinis and granache from its former teller stations. Wood and marble were preserved and buffed, glass barriers removed. In the evening light the place was golden. It was cute! So what if subtle boundaries of occasion and transaction had been given up on? So what if this were a mausoleum of greed now danced in by all. He and Suzy had been invited. The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

His invitation, however, to this D.C. fundraiser seemed to Bake a bit of a fluke, since Man on a Quarter, Man on a Horse, Bake's ill-selling biography of George Washington (in a year when everyone was obsessed with Lincoln, even the efficiently conflated Presidents' Day had failed to help his book sales) would appear to fit him to neither category of guest. But Lunar Lines, whose offices were in Washington, had excerpted a portion of it, as if in celebration of their town. And so Bake was sent two free dinner tickets. He would have to rub elbows and charm the other guests — the rich, the magazine's donors who would be paying 500 dollars a plate. Could he manage that? Could he be the court jester, the town clown, the token writer at the table? "Absolutely," he lied.

Why had he come? Though it was named after the man he had devoted years of affectionate thought and research to, he had never liked this city. An ostentatious company town built on a marsh — a mammoth, pompous, chit-ridden motor vehicle department run by gladiators. High-level clerks on the take, their heads full of unsound soundbites and falsified recall. "Yes! How are you? It's been a while?" Not even "it's been a long time" because who knew? Perhaps it hadn't been. Better just to say, neutrally, "It's been a while," and no one could argue.

He clung to Suzy. "At least the wine is good," she said. They weren't really mingling. They were doing something that was more like a stiff list, a drift and sway. The acoustics made it impossible to speak normally and so they found themselves shouting inanities then just falling mute. The noise of the place was deafening as a sea, and the booming heartiness of others seemed to destroy all possibility of happiness for themselves.

"Soon we'll have to find our table," he shouted, glancing out at the vast room filled with a hundred white-clothed circles, flickering with candlelight. Small vases of heather sprigs that could easily catch fire had been placed in the center as well. So were little chrome cardholders declaring the table numbers. "What number are we?"

Suzy pulled the tag from what he facetiously called her "darling little bag" then shoved it back in. "Seventy-nine," she said. "I hope that's near the restroom."

"I hope it's near the exit."

"Let's make a dash for it now!"

"Let's scream 'fire!'"

"Let's fake heart attacks!"

"Do you have any pot?"

"We flew here — remember? I wouldn't bring pot on an airplane."

"We're losing our sense of adventure. In all things."

"This is an adventure!"

"You see, that's what I mean."

At the ringing of a small bell everyone began to sit — not just the ones in wheelchairs, whom he had begun to envy. Bake let Suzy lead as they wended their way, drinks in hand, between the dozens of tables that were between them and number 79. They were the first ones there, and when he looked at the place cards and saw that someone had placed Suzy far away from him, he quickly switched the seating arrangements and placed her next to him, on his left. "I didn't come this far not to sit next to you," he said, and she smiled wanly, squeezing his upper arm. These kinds of gestures were necessary, since they had not had sex in six months. "I'm sixty and I'm on antidepressants," said Bake, when Suzy had once (why only once?) complained. "I'm lucky my penis hasn't dropped off."

They remained standing by their seats, waiting for their table to fill up: Soon a young investor couple from Wall Street who had not yet lost their jobs. Then a sculptor and her son. Then an editorial assistant from 3LJ. Then lastly, to claim the seat to his right, a brisk young Asian woman in tapping heels. She thrust her hand out to greet him. Her nails were long and painted white — perhaps they were fake: Suzy would know, though Suzy was now sitting down and talking to the sculptor next to her.

"I'm Linda Santo," the woman to his right said, smiling. Her hair was black and shiny and long enough so that with a toss of the head she could swing it back behind her shoulder and short enough that it would fall quickly forward again. She was wearing a navy-blue satin dress and a string of pearls. The red shawl she had wrapped over her shoulders she now placed on the back of her seat. He felt a small stirring in him. He had always been attracted to Asian women, though he knew he mustn't ever mention this to Suzy, or to anyone really.

"I'm Baker McKurty," he said shaking her hand.

"Baker?" she repeated.

"I usually go by 'Bake.'" He accidentally gave her a wink. One had to be very stable to wink at a person and not frighten them.

"Bake?" She looked a little horrified — if one could be horrified only a little. She was somehow aghast — and so he pulled out her chair to show her that he was harmless. No sooner were they all seated then appetizers zoomed in. Tomatoes stuffed with avocados and avocados with tomatoes. It was a witticism — with a Christmassy look though Christmas was a long way away.

"So where are all the writers?" Linda Santo asked him while looking over both her shoulders. The shiny hair flew. "I was told there would be writers here."

"You're not a writer?"

"No, I'm an evil lobbyist," she said, grinning slightly. "Are you a writer?"

"In a manner of speaking, I suppose," he said.

"You are?" She brightened. "What might you have written?"

"What might I have written? Or, what did I actually write?"

"Either one."

He cleared his throat. "I've written several biographies. Boy George. King George. And now George Washington. That's my most recent. A biography of George Washington. A captivating man, really, with a tremendous knack for real estate. And a peevishness about being overlooked for promotion when he served in the British army. The things that will start a war! And I'm not like his other biographers. I don't rule out his being gay."

"You're a biographer of Georges," she said, nodding and unmoved. Clearly she'd been hoping for Don DeLillo.

This provoked him. He veered off into a demented heat. "Actually, I've won the Nobel Prize."

"Really?"

"Yes! But, well, I won it during a year when the media weren't paying a lot of attention. So it kind of got lost in the shuffle. I won — right after 9/11. In the shadow of 9/11. Actually, I won right as the second tower was being hit."

She scowled. "The Nobel Prize for Literature?"

"Oh, for Literature? No, no, no — not for Literature." His penis now sat soft as a shrinking peach in his pants.

Suzy leaned in on his left and spoke across Bake's plate to Linda. "Is he bothering you? If he bothers you, just let me know. I'm Suzy." She pulled her hand out of her lap and the two women shook hands over his avocado. He could see Linda's nails were fake. Or, if not fake, something. They resembled talons.

"This is Linda," said Bake. "She's an evil lobbyist."

"Really!" Suzy said good-naturedly, but soon the sculptor was tapping her on the arm and she had to turn back and be introduced to the sculptor's son.

"Is it hard being a lobbyist?"

"It's interesting," she said. "It's hard work but interesting."

"That's the best kind."

"Where are you from?"

"Chicago."

"Oh, really," she said, as if he had announced his close connection to Al Capone. Anyone he ever mentioned Chicago to always brought up Capone. Either Capone or the Cubs.

"So you know the Presidential candidate for the Democrats?"

"Brocko? Love him! He's the great new thing. Honest. Practical. One of us! He's a writer himself. I wonder if he's here." Now Bake, as if in mimicry, turned and looked over both his shoulders.

"He's probably out with his terrorist friends."

"He has terrorist friends?" Bake himself had a terrorist friend. Midwesterners loved their terrorist friends! Who were usually balding, boring citizens still mythically dining out on the sins of their long-ago youth. They never actually killed anyone — at least not intentionally. They aged and fattened in the ordinary fashion. They were rehabilitated. They served their time. And, well, if they didn't, because of infuriating class privilege that allowed them to just go on as if nothing had ever happened, then they raised each other's children and got advanced degrees and gave back to society in other ways. He supposed. He didn't really know much about Chicago. He was actually from Michigan, but when going anywhere he always flew out of O'Hare.

"Uh, yeah. That bomber who tried to blow up federal buildings light here in this town."

"When Brocko was a kid? That sixties guy? But Brocko doesn't even like the sixties. He thinks they're so… sixties. The sixties took his mother on some wild ride away from him."

"The sixties made him, my friend."

Bake looked at her more closely. Now he could see she wasn't Asian. She had simply had some kind of plastic surgery: skin was stretched and draped strangely around her eyes. A botched eye job. A bad facelift. An acid peel. Whatever it was: Suzy would know exactly.

"Well, he was a young child."

"So he says."

"Is there some dispute about his age?"

"Where is his birth certificate?"

"I have no idea," said Bake. "I have no idea where my own is."

"Here is my real problem: this country was founded by and continues to be held together by people who have worked very hard to get where they are."

Bake shrugged and wagged his head around. Could he speak of people having things they didn't deserve, in a roomful of such people? Now would not be the time to speak of timing. It would be unlucky to speak of luck. She continued. "And if you don't understand that, my friend, then we cannot continue this conversation."

The sudden way in which the whole possibility of communication was now on the line startled him. "I see you've researched the founding of this country." He would look for common ground.

"I watched John Adams on HBO. Every single episode."

"Wasn't the guy who played George Washington uncanny? I did think Jefferson looked distractingly like Martin Amis. I wonder if Martin is here?" He looked over his shoulders again. He needed Martin Amis to get over here right now and help him.

Linda looked at him fiercely. "It was a great mini-series and a great reminder of the founding principles of our nation."

"Did you know George Washington was afraid of being buried alive?"

"I didn't know about that."

"The guy scarcely had a fear except for that one. You knew he freed his slaves?"

"Hmmmm."

She was eating; he was not. This would not work to his advantage. Nonetheless he went on. "Talk about people who've toiled hard in this country — and yet, not to argue with your thesis too much, those slaves didn't all get ahead."

"Your man Barama, my friend, would not even be in the running if he wasn't black."

Now all appetite left him entirely. The food on his plate, whatever it was, splotches of taupe, dollops of orange, went abstract like a painting. His blood pressure flew up; he could feel the pulsing twitch in his temple. "You know, I never thought about it before but you're right! Being black really is the fastest, easiest way to get to the White House!"

She said nothing, and so he added, "Unless you're going by cab, and then, well, it can slow you down a little."

Chewing, Linda looked at him, a flash in her eyes. She swallowed. "Well, supposedly we've already had a black president."

"We have?"

"Yes! A Nobel Prize-winning author said so!"

"Hey. Take it firsthand from me: don't believe everything that a Nobel prizewinner tells you. I don't think a black president ever gets to become president when his nightclub-singer mistress is holding press conferences during the campaign. That would be — a white president. Please pass the salt."

The shaker appeared before him. He shook some salt around on his plate and stared at it.

Now Linda made a stern, effortful smile, struggling to cut something with her knife. Was it meat? Was it poultry? It was consoling to think that, for a change, the rich had had to pay a pretty penny for their chicken while his was free. But it was not consoling enough. "If you don't think I as a woman know a thing or two about prejudice, you would be sadly mistaken," Linda said.

"Hey, it's not that easy being a man, either," said Bake. "There's all that cash you have to spend on porn? and believe me, that's money you never get back."

He then retreated, turned toward his left, toward Suzy, and leaned in. "Help me," he whispered in her ear.

"Are you charming the patrons?"

"I fear some object may be thrown."

"You're supposed to charm the patrons."

"I know, I know, I was trying to. I swear. But she's one of those who keeps referring to Brocko as 'Barama.'" He had violated most of Suzy's dinner-talk rules already: No politics, no religion, no portfolio tips. And unless you see the head crowning, never look at a woman's stomach and ask if she's pregnant. He had learned all these the hard way.

But in a year like this one, there was no staying away from certain topics.

"Get back there," Suzy said. The sculptor was tapping Suzy on the arm again.

He tried once more with Linda Santo the evil lobbyist. "Here's the way I see it — and this I think you'll appreciate. It would be great at long last to have a president in the White House whose last name ends with a vowel."

"We've never had a President whose last name ended with a vowel?"

"Well, I don't count Coolidge."

"You're from what part of Chicago?"

"Well, just outside Chicago."

"Where outside?"

"Michigan."

"Isn't Michigan a long way from Chicago?"

"It is!" He could feel the cool air on the skin between his socks and his pantcuffs. When he looked at her hands, they seemed frozen into claws.

"People talk about the rock-solid sweetness of the heartland, but I have to say: Chicago seems like a city that has taken too much pride in its own criminal activity." She smiled grimly.

"I don't think that's true." Or was it? He was trying to give her a chance. What if she was right? "Perhaps we have an unfulfilled streak of myth-making. Or perhaps we just don't live as fearfully as people do elsewhere," he said. Now he was just guessing.

"You wait, my friend, there are some diabolical people eyeing that Sears Tower as we speak."

Now he was silent.

"And if you're in it when it happens, which I hope you're not, but if you are, if you are, if you are, if you're eating lunch at the top or having a meeting down below or whatever it is you may be doing, you will be changed. Because I've been there. I know what it's like to be bombed by terrorists — I was in the Pentagon when they crashed that plane right down into it and I'll tell you: I was burned alive but not dead. I was burned alive. It lit me inside. Because of that I know more than ever what this country is about, my friend."

He saw now that her fingernails really were plastic, that the hand really was a dry frozen claw, that the face that had seemed intriguingly exotic had actually been scarred by fire and only partially repaired. He saw how she was cloaked in a courageous and intense hideosity. The hair was beautiful but now he imagined it was probably a wig. Pity poured through him: he'd never before felt so sorry for someone. How could someone have suffered so much? How could someone have come so close to death, so unfairly, so painfully and heroically, and how could he still want to strangle them?

"You were a lobbyist for the Pentagon?" was all he managed to say.

"any faux pas?" asked Suzy in the cab on the way back to the B and B, where warm cookies would await them by their door, tea packets in the bath, their own snore strips on the nightstand.

"Beaucoup faux," said Bake. He pronounced it foze. "Beaucoup verboten foze. Uttering my very name was like standing on the table and peeing in a wineglass."

"What? Oh, please."

"I'm afraid I spoke about politics. I couldn't control myself."

"Brocko is going to win. All will be well. Rest assured," she said, as the cab sped along toward Georgetown, the street curbs rusted and rouged with the first fallen leaves.

"Promise?"

"Promise."

He was afraid to say more. He did not know how much time he and Suzy might even have left together, and an endgame of geriatric speed-dating — everyone deaf and looking identical; "What? I can't hear you? What? You again? Didn't I just see you?" — all taking place midst bankruptcy and war might be the real circle of hell he was destined for.

"Don't ever leave me," he said.

"Why on earth would I do that?"

He paused. "I'm putting in a request not just for on earth, but even for after that."

"OK," she said, and squeezed his meaty thigh. At least he had once liked to think of it as meaty.

"I fear you will someday decide I'm less than adequate," he said.

"You're adequate," she said, her hand still on his leg.

He cleared his throat. "I'm adequate enough."

She kept her hand there and on top of hers he placed his, the one with the wedding ring she had given him, identical to her own. He willed all his love into the very ends of his fingertips and watched as his hand clasped hers, studied the firm, deliberate hydraulics of its knuckles and joints. But she soon turned her head away and looked out the window, showing him only her beautiful hair, which was lit like gold by the passing streetlamps, as if it were something not attached to her at all.

Paper Losses

although kit and rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no-nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, Kit and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old, lusty love mutated to rage. It was both their shame and demise that hate (like love) could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shone a spotlight down for it to seize. Do your stuff, baby! Who is the best? Who's the man?

"Pro-nuke? You are? Really?" Kit was asked by her friends, to whom she continued, indiscreetly, to complain.

"Well, no." Kit sighed. "But in a way."

"Seems like you need someone to talk to."

Which hurt Kit's feelings, since she'd felt that she was talking to them. "I'm simply concerned about the kids," she said.

rafe had changed. His smile was just a careless yawn, or was his smile just stuck carelessly on? Which was the correct lyric? She didn't know. But, for sure, he had changed. In Beersboro, one put things neutrally, like that. Such changes were couched. No one ever said that a man was now completely fucked-up. They said, "The guy has changed." Rafe had started to make model rockets in the basement.

He'd become a little different. He was something of a character. The brazen might suggest, "He's gotten into some weird shit." The rockets were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals. What had happened to the handsome hippie she'd married? He was prickly and remote, empty with fury. A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes. They stayed wide and bright but non-functional, like dime-store jewelry. She wondered if this was a nervous breakdown, the genuine article. But it persisted for months, and she began to suspect, instead, a brain tumor. Occasionally, he catcalled and wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed. "Hey, curie," he'd call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with someone's demented uncle: should marriage be like that? She wasn't sure.

She seldom saw him anymore when he got up in the morning and rushed off to his office. And when he came home from work he'd disappear down the basement stairs. Nightly, in the anxious conjugal dusk that was now their only life together, after the kids had gone to bed, the house would fill up with fumes. When she called down to him about this, he never answered. He seemed to have turned into some sort of space alien. Of course, later she would understand that all this meant that he was involved with another woman, but at the time, protecting her own vanity and sanity, she was working with two hypotheses only: brain tumor or space alien.

"All husbands are space aliens," her friend Jan said on the phone.

"God help me, I had no idea." Kit began spreading peanut butter on a pretzel and eating quickly. "He's in such disconnect. His judgment is so bad."

"Not on the planet he lives on. On his planet, he's a veritable Solomon. 'Bring the stinkin' baby to me now!'"

"Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?"

"Sure! Look at Louie North."

"He lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven."

"But he got some votes."

"Yeah, and now what is he doing?"

"Now he's promoting a line of fire-retardant pajamas. It's a life!" She paused. "Do you fight about it?"

"About what?" Kit asked.

"The rockets back to his homeland."

Kit sighed again. "Yes, the toxic military-crafts business poisoning our living space. Do I fight? I don't fight, I just, well, O.K. — I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, 'What the hell are you doing?' I ask, 'Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?' I ask, 'Did you hear me?' Then I ask, 'Did you hear me?' again. Then I ask, 'Are you deaf?' I also ask, 'What do you think a marriage is? I'm really just curious to know,' and also, 'Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?' A simple interview, really. I don't believe in fighting. I believe in giving peace a chance. I also believe in internal bleeding." She paused to shift the phone more comfortably against her face. "I'm also interested," Kit said, "in those forensically undetectable dissolving plastic bullets. Have you heard of those?"

"No."

"Well, maybe I'm wrong about those. I'm probably wrong. That's where the Mysterious Car Crash may have to come in."

In the chrome of the refrigerator she caught the reflection of her own face, part brunette Shelley Winters, part potato, the finely etched sharps and accidentals beneath her eyes a musical interlude amid the bloat. In every movie she had seen with Shelley Winters in it, Shelley Winters was the one who died.

Peanut butter was stuck high and dry on Kit's gums. On the counter, a large old watermelon had begun to sag and pull apart in the middle along the curve of seeds, like a shark's grin, and she lopped off a wedge, rubbed its cool point around the inside of her mouth. It had been a year since Rafe had kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn't. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: choosing the best unhappiness. An unwise move and, good God, you could squander everything.

the summons took her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She'd been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even when buried in its favorite suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date. "Why not complete the symmetry?" he wrote, which didn't even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and generally in keeping with the principles of space-alien culture.

The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if the more formal versions of them were the ones who were divorcing — their birth certificates were divorcing! — and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not yet told her that he'd bought a new one. "Honey," she said, trembling, "something very interesting came in the mail today."

rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center with a cold blue heat. At the funerals of two different elderly people she hardly knew, she wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe — or, rather, Raphael — again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation; it was already booked, so what could they do?

This, at last, was what all those high-school drama classes had been for: acting. She had once played the queen in A Winter's Tale, and once a changeling child in a play called Love Me Right Now, written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these performances, she had learned that time was essentially a comic thing — only constraints upon it diverted it to tragedy, or, at least, to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde — if only they'd had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disturbed and the funniness of which was never-ending.

Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in an effort to persuade her not to join him and the children on this vacation. "I don't think you should go," he announced.

"I'm going," she said.

"We'll be giving the children false hope."

"Hope is never false. Or it's always false. Whatever. It's just hope," she said. "Nothing wrong with that."

"I just don't think you should go."

Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab. Who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?

What bimbo did he want to give her ticket to?

(Only later would she find out. "As a feminist you mustn't blame the other woman," a neighbor told her. "As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me." Kit replied.)

And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage "irretrievably broken." What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction. Was not everything fixable? This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives? Why "irretrievably broken" like a songbird's wing? Why not, "Do you find this person you were married to, and who is now sitting next to you in the courtroom, a total asshole?" That would suffice, and be more accurate. The words "irretrievably broken" sent one off into an eternity of wondering.

At this point, however, she and Rafe had not yet signed the papers. And there was still the matter of her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn't look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring — which did look like a typical wedding ring — a year before, because, he said, "it bothered him." She had thought at the time that he'd meant it was rubbing. She had not been deeply alarmed; he had often shed his clothes spontaneously — when they first met, he'd been something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.

"What if I can't get my ring off?" she said to him now on the plane. She had gained a little weight during their twenty years of marriage, but really not all that much. She had been practically a child bride!

"Send me the sawyer's bill," he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye was gone!

"What is wrong with you?" she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space-alien values, space-alien thoughts, and the hollow, shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.

"What is wrong with you?" he snarled. This was his habit, his space-alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.

She was less worried about the girls, who were just little, than she was about Sam, her sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle, moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the state's extremely progressive divorce laws — a boy needs his dad! — she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle a little and float off and away like paper carried by wind. With time, he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d' suspecting riffraff. He would see her coming the way a panicked party guest sees someone without a nametag. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on.

They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs — a family about to break apart forever — didn't look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers, she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local boys from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white, beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it and downplay the creases — to make her appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once glanced at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had got lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop — the words "La Caribe" emblazoned across every single thing.

On the beach, people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the barbed wire, throwing rocks.

sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but he sensed their cruelty. "They speak a language," he said. "We shouldn't ride them."

"They look happy," Kit said.

Sam studied her with a seriousness from some sweet beyond. "They look happy so you won't kill them."

"You think so?"

"If dolphins tasted good," he said, "we wouldn't even know about their language." That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could understand something only if you did not desire it. How did he know such things already? Usually girls knew them first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond her comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase "cinnamon M&M's" repeated six times, fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carried wands. "I'm a big brother now," Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bale, as they, for instance, buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. A woman on a towel, one of those reading of genocide, turned and smiled. In this fine compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable.

Kit went to the central office and signed up for a hot-stone massage. "Would you like a man or a woman?" the receptionist asked.

"Excuse me?" Kit said, stalling. After all these years of marriage, which did she want? What did she know of men — or women? "There's no such thing as 'men,'" Jan used to say. "Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is, well, a capacity for horrifying violence."

"A man or a woman — for the massage?" Kit asked. She thought of the slow mating of snails, hermaphrodites for whom it was all so confusing: by the time they had figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy, someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.

"Oh, either one," she said, and then knew she'd get a man.

Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas — tobacco, incense, cannabis — swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed. His name was Dan Handler, according to the business card he wore safety-pinned to his shirt like a badge. He did not speak. He placed hot stones up and down her back and left them there. Did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the likes of him? Are you crazy? The mad joy in her face was held over the floor by the massage-table headpiece, and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out of her nose, which she realized was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage-hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. A heart could break. But perhaps, like a several-hearted worm, you could move on to the next one, then the next. The masseur left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat, she could no longer feel it there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and then feel something only then, at the end. Though this wasn't the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean but more likely had no intention at all.

"That was nice," she said, as he was putting all his stones away. He bad heated them in a plastic electric Crockpot filled with water, and now he unplugged the thing in a tired fashion.

"Where did you get those stones?" she asked. They were smooth and dark gray — black when wet, she saw.

"They're river stones," he said. "I've been collecting them for years up in Colorado." He placed them in a metal fishing-tackle box.

"You live in Colorado?" she asked.

"Used to," he said, and that was that.

on the last night of their vacation, her suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn't even open it. Sam put out the little doorknob flag that said "wake us up for the sea turtles." The flag had a preprinted request for a 3 a.m. wakeup call so that they could go to the beach and see the hatching of the baby sea turtles and their quick scuttle into the ocean, under the cover of night, to avoid predators. Hut though Sam had hung the flag carefully, and before the midnight deadline, no staff person woke them. And by the time they got up and went down to the beach it was ten in the morning. Strangely, the sea turtles were still there. They had hatched during the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who were too lazy or deaf to have got up in the night.

"Look, come see!" cried a man with a Spanish accent who usually rented the scuba gear. Sam, Beth, Dale, and Kit all ran over. (Rafe had stayed behind to drink coffee and read the paper.) The squirming babies were beginning to heat up in the sun; the goldening Venetian vellum of their wee webbed feet was already edged in desiccating brown. "I'm going to have to let them go now," the man said. "You are the last ones to see these little bebés." He took them over to the water's edge and let them go, hours too late, to make their own way into the sea. That's when a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them, one by one, from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.

Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else's lust. His every posture contained a strut.

"I think I need a drink," she said. The kids were swimming.

"Don't expect me to buy you a drink," he said.

Had she even asked him to? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passers-by? Who told you that?

when they finally left La Caribe, she was glad. Staying there, she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro, she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But, for now, she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who, as he aged stoically and carried on in bottomless forgetting, would come to scarcely recall — was it even past imagining? — that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.

The Juniper Tree

the night robin ross was dying in the hospital, I was waiting for a man to come pick me up — a man she had once dated, months before I began to — and he was late and I was wondering whether his going to see her with me was even wise. Perhaps I should go alone. Our colleague ZJ had called that morning and said, "Things are bad. When she leaves the hospital, she's not going home."

"I'll go see her tonight," I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I would make it so. It was less like integrity, perhaps, and more like magic.

"That's a good idea," ZJ said. He was chairman of the theatre department and had taken charge, like a husband, since Robin had asked him to. His tearfulness about her fate had already diminished. In the eighties, he had lost a boyfriend to aids, and now all the legal and medical decision-making these last few months, he said, seemed numbly familiar.

But then I found myself waiting, and soon it was seven-thirty and then eight and I imagined Robin was tired and sleeping in her metal hospital bed and would have more energy in the morning. When the man I was waiting for came, I said, "You know? It's so late. Maybe I should visit Robin in the morning, when she'll have more energy and be more awake. The tumor presses on the skull, poor girl, and makes her groggy."

"Whatever you think is best," said the man. When I told him what ZJ had said, that when Robin left the hospital she wasn't going home, the man looked puzzled. "Where is she going to go?" He hadn't dated Robin very long, only a few weeks, and had never really understood her. "Her garage was a pig sty," he once said. "I couldn't believe all the crap that was in it." And I had nodded agreeably, feeling I had won him; my own garage wasn't that great, but whatever. I had triumphed over others by dint of some unknowable charm. Now I was coming to realize that a lot of people baffled this guy, and that I would be next to become incomprehensible and unattractive. That is how dating among straight middle-aged women seemed to go in this college town: one available man every year or so just made the rounds of us all. "I can share. I'm good at sharing," Robin used to say, laughing. "Well, I'm not," I said. "I'm not good at it in the least."

"It's late," I said again to the man, and I made two gin rickeys and lit candles.

Every woman I knew here drank — nightly. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for the stray voltages of mother-love in the very places they would never be found: gin, men, the college, our own mothers, and one another. I was the only one of my friends — all of us academic transplants, all soldiers of art stationed on a far-off base (or so we imagined it) — who hadn't had something terrible happen to her yet.

the next morning I dressed in cheery colors. Orange and gold. There was nothing useful to bring Robin, but I made a bouquet of cut mums nonetheless and stuck them in a plastic cup with some wet paper towels holding them in. I was headed toward the front door when the phone rang. It was ZJ. "I'm leaving now to see Robin," I said.

"Don't bother."

"Oh, no," I said. My vision left me for a second.

"She died late last night. About two in the morning."

I sank down into a chair, and my plastic cup of mums fell, breaking two stems. "Oh, my God," I said.

"I know," he said.

"I was going to go see her last night but it got late and I thought it would be better to go this morning when she was more rested." I tried not to wail.

"Don't worry about it," he said.

"I feel terrible," I cried, as if this were what mattered.

"She was not doing well. It's a blessing." From diagnosis to decline had been precipitous, I knew. She had started the semester teaching, then suddenly the new chemo was not going well and she was lying outside the emergency room, on the concrete, afraid to lie down inside because of other people's germs. She was placed in the actual hospital, which was full of other people's germs. Then she'd been there almost a week and I hadn't made it in to see her.

"It's all so unbelievable."

"I know."

"How are you?" I asked.

"I can't even go there," he said.

"Please phone me if there's something I can do," I said emptily. "Let me know when the service will be."

"Sure," he said.

I went upstairs and with all my cheery clothes on got back into bed. It still smelled a little of the man. I pulled the sheet over my head and lay there, every muscle of my body strung taut. I could not move.

But I must have fallen asleep, and for some time, because when I heard the doorbell downstairs and pulled the sheet off my face it was already dark, though the sun set these days at four, so it was hard ever to know just by looking out the window what time it might possibly be. I flicked on the lights as I went — bedroom, hall, stairs — making my way down toward the ringing bell. I turned on the porch light and opened the door.

There stood Isabel, her left coat sleeve dangling empty at her side, and Pat, whose deep eyes looked crazy and bright as a dog's. "We've got the gin, we've got the rickey mix," they said, holding up the bags. "Come on. We're going to go see Robin."

"I thought Robin died," I said.

Pat made a face. "Yes, well," she said.

"That hospital was such a bad scene," said Isabel. She was not wearing her prosthetic arm. Except in pieces choreographed by others, she almost never did anymore. "But she's back home now and expecting us."

"How can that be?"

"You know women and their houses," said Pat. "It's hard for them to part company." Pat had had a massive stroke two years ago, which had wiped out her ebullient personality and her short-term memory, but periodically her wounded, recovering brain cast about desperately and landed on a switch and threw it, and she woke up in a beautiful manic frenzy, seeming like the old Pat, saying, "I feel like I've been asleep for years," and she would stay like that for days on end, insomniac and babbling and reminiscing, painting her paintings, then she'd crash again, passive and mute. She was on disability leave and had a student living with her full time who took care of her.

"Maybe we all drink too much gin," I said.

For a moment there was just silence. "Are you referring to the accident?" said Isabel accusingly. It was a car crash that had severed her arm. A surgeon and his team of residents had sewn it back on, but the arm had bled continually through the skin grafts and was painful — her first dance afterward, before an audience, a solo performed with much spinning and swinging from a rope, flung specks of blood to the stage floor — and after a year, and a small, ineffectual codeine habit, she went back to the same surgeon and asked him to remove it, the whole arm: she was done, she had tried.

"No, no," I said. "I'm not referring to anything."

"So, hey, come on, come on!" said Pat. The switch seemed to have been thrown in her. "Robin's waiting."

"What do I bring?"

"Bring?" Pat and Isabel burst out laughing. "You're kidding, right?"

"She's kidding," said Isabel. She felt the sleeve of my orange sweater, which I was still wearing. "Hey. This color looks nice on you. Where did you get this?"

"I forget."

"Yeah, so do I," said Pat, and she and Isabel burst into fits of hilarity again. I put on shoes, grabbed a jacket, and left with them.

isabel drove, one-armed, to Robin's. When we arrived, the house was completely dark, but the street lights showed once more the witchy strangeness of the place. Because she wrote plays based on fairy tales, Robin had planted in the yard, rather haphazardly, the trees and shrubs that figured most prominently in the tales: apple, juniper, hazelnut, and rose shrubs. Unfortunately, our latitude was not the best gardening zone for these. Even braced, chained, and trussed, they had struggled, jagged and leggy; at this time of year, when they were leafless and bent, one couldn't say for sure whether they were even alive. Spring would tell.

Why would a man focus on her garage when there was this crazed landscaping with which to judge her? Make this your case: no jury would convict.

Why would a man focus on anything but her?

We parked in the driveway, where Robin's own car was still parked, her garage no doubt locked — even in the dark one could see the boxes stacked against the one small garage window that faced the street.

"The key's under the mat," said Isabel, though I didn't know this and wondered how she did. Pat found the key, unlocked the door, and we all went in. "Don't turn on the lights," Isabel added.

"I know," whispered Pat, though I didn't know.

"Why can't we turn on the lights?" I asked, also in a whisper. The door closed behind us, and we stood there in the quiet, pitch-black house.

"The police," said Pat.

"No, not the police," said Isabel.

"Then what?"

"Never mind. Just give it a minute and our eyes will adjust." We stood there listening to our own breathing. We didn't move, so as not to trip over anything.

And then, on the opposite side of the room, a small light flicked on from somewhere at the far end of the hallway; we could not see down it, but out stepped Robin, looking pretty much the same, though she had a white cotton scarf wrapped and knotted around her neck. Against the white, her teeth had a fluorescent ochre sheen, but otherwise she looked regal and appraising and she smiled at all of us, including me — though more tentatively, I thought, at me. Then she put her finger to her lips and shook her head, so we didn't speak.

"You came" were her first hushed words, directed my way. "I missed you a little at the hospital." Her smile had become clearly tight and judging.

"I am so sorry," I said.

"That's O.K., they'll tell you," she said, indicating Is and Pat. "It was a little nuts."

"It was totally nuts," said Pat.

"It was standing around watching someone die," Isabel whispered in my ear.

"As a result?" said Robin, a bit hoarsely. She cleared her throat. "No hugs. Everything's a little precarious, between the postmortem and the tubes in and out all week. This scarf's the only thing holding my head on." Though she was pale, her posture was perfect, her dark-red hair restored, her long thin arms folded across her chest. She was dressed as she was always dressed: in black jeans and a blue sweater. She simply, newly, had the imperial standoffishness that I realized only then I had always associated with the dead. We pulled up chairs and each of us sat.

"Should we make some gin rickeys?" Isabel asked, motioning toward the bags of booze and lime-juice blend.

"Oh, maybe not," said Robin.

"We wanted to come here and each present you with something," said Pat.

"We did?" I said. I'd brought nothing. I had asked them what to bring and they had laughed it off.

Robin looked at me. "Always a little out of the loop, eh?" She smiled stiffly.

Pat was digging around in a hemp tote bag I hadn't noticed before. "Here's a little painting I made for you," she said, handing a small unframed canvas gingerly to Robin. I couldn't see what the painting was of. Robin stared at it for a very long time and then looked back up and at Pat and said, "Thank you so much." She momentarily laid the painting in her lap and I could see it was nothing but a plain white blank.

I looked longingly at the paper sack of gin.

"And I have a new dance for you!" whispered Isabel excitedly.

"You do?" I said.

Robin turned to me again. "Always the last to know, huh," she said, and then winced, as if speaking hurt. She clutched Pat's painting to her stomach.

Isabel stood and moved her chair out of the way. "This piece is dedicated to Robin Ross," she announced. And then, after a moment's stillness, she began to move, saying lines of poetry as she did. "Heap not on this mound / Roses that she loved so well; / Why bewilder her with roses, / That she cannot see or smell?" There was more, and as, reciting, she flew and turned and balanced on one leg, her single arm aloft, I thought, What the hell kind of poem is this? It seemed rude to speak of death to the dead, and I kept checking Robin's face, to see how she was taking it, but Robin remained impassive. At the end, she placed the painting back in her lap and clapped. I was about to clap as well, when car headlights from the driveway suddenly arced across the room.

"It's the cops! Get down!" said Isabel, and we all hit the floor.

"I think they're patrolling the house," whispered Robin, lying on her back on the rug. She was hugging Pat's painting to her chest. "I guess there was a call from a neighbor or something. Just lie here for a minute and they'll leave." The police car idled in the driveway for a minute, perhaps taking down the license number of Isabel's car, and then pulled away.

"It's O.K. We can get up now," said Robin.

"Whew. That was close," said Pat.

We all got back into our chairs, Robin with some difficulty, and there was then a long silence, like a Quaker wedding, which I came to understand was being directed at me.

"Well, I guess it's my turn," I said. "It's been a terrible month. First the election, and now this. You." I indicated Robin, and she nodded just slightly, then grabbed at her scarf and retied the knot. "And I don't have my violin or my piano here," I said. Isabel and Pat were staring at me hopelessly. "So — I guess I'll just sing." I stood up and cleared my throat. I knew that if you took "The Star-Spangled Banner" very slowly and mournfully it altered not just the attitude of the song but the actual punctuation, turning it into a protest and a question. I sang it slowly, not without a little twang. "O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?" Then I sat down. The three of them applauded, Isabel clapping her thigh.

"Very nice," said Robin. "You never sing enough," she added ambiguously. Her smile to me was effortful and pinched. "Now I have to go," she said, and she stood, leaving Pat's painting behind on the chair, and walked into the lit hallway, after which we heard the light switch flick off, and the whole house was plunged into darkness again.

"well, i'm glad we did that," I said on the way back home. I was sitting alone in the back, sneaking some of the gin — why bother ever again with rickey mix? — and I'd been staring out the window. Now I looked forward and noticed that Pat was driving. Pat hadn't driven in years. A pickup truck with the bumper sticker "No Hillary No Way" roared past us, and we stared at its message as if we were staring at a swastika. Where were we living?

"Redneck," Isabel muttered at the driver.

"It's a trap, isn't it," I said.

"What is?" asked Pat.

"This place!" exclaimed Isabel. "Our work! Our houses! The college!"

"It's all a trap!" I repeated.

But we did not entirely believe it. Somewhere inside us we were joyful orphans: our lives were right, we were zooming along doing what we wanted, we were sometimes doing what we loved. But we were inadequate as a pit crew, for ourselves or for anyone else. "It was good to see Robin," I continued from the back. "It was really good to see her."

"That's true," said Isabel. Pat said nothing. She was coming off her manic high and driving took all she had.

"All in all, it was a good night," I said.

"A really good night," agreed Isabel.

"good night," Robin had said the last time I'd seen her well, standing in her own doorway. She had invited me over and we were hanging out, eating her summery stir-fry, things both lonely and warm between us, when she asked about the man I was seeing, the one she had dated briefly.

"Well, I don't know," I said, a little sad. At that point I was still sitting at her table and I found myself rubbing the grain of it with one finger. "He seems now also to be seeing this other person — Daphne Kern? Do you know her? She's one of those beautician-slash-art dealers?" All the restaurants, coffee shops, and hair salons in town seemed to have suddenly gotten into hanging, showing, and selling art. This dignified, or artified, the business of serving. Did I feel I was better, more interesting, with my piano and my violin and my singing?

"I know Daphne. I took a yoga class once from her, when she was doing that."

"You did?" I could not control myself. "So what's so compelling about her?" My voice was not successfully shy of a whine. "Is she nice?"

"She's pretty, she's nice, she's intuitive," Robin said, casually ticking off the qualities. "She's actually a talented yoga instructor. She's very physical. Even when she speaks she uses her body a lot. You know, frankly? She's probably just really good in bed."

At this my heart sickened and plummeted down my left side and into my shoe. My appetite, too, shrank to a small pebble and sat in stony reserve in the place my heart had been and to which my heart would at some point return, but just not in time for dessert.

"I've made a lemon meringue pie," said Robin, getting up and clearing the dishes. She was always making pies. She would have written more plays if she had made fewer pies. "More meringue than lemon, I'm afraid."

"Oh, thank you. I'm just full," I said, looking down at my unfinished food.

"I'm sorry," Robin said, a hint of worry in her voice. "Should I not have said that thing about Daphne?"

"Oh, no," I said. "That's fine. It's nothing." But soon I felt it was time for me to go, and after a single cup of tea I stood, clearing only a few of the dishes with her. I found my purse and headed for the door.

She stood in the doorway, holding the uneaten meringue pie. "That skirt, by the way, is great," she said in the June night. "Orange is a good color on you. Orange and gold."

"Thanks," I said.

Then, without warning, she suddenly lifted up the pie and pushed it into her own face. When she pulled off the tin, meringue clung to her skin like blown snow. The foam of it covered her lashes and brows and, with her red hair, for a minute she looked like a demented Queen Elizabeth.

"What the fuck?" I said, shaking my head. I needed new friends. I would go to more conferences and meet more people.

"I've always wanted to do that," said Robin. The mask of meringue on her face looked eerie, not clownish at all, and her mouth speaking through the white foam seemed to be a separate creature entirely, a puppet or a fish. "I've always wanted to do that, and now I have."

"Hey," I said. "There's no business like show business." I was digging in my purse for my car keys.

Long hair flying over her head, bits of meringue dropping on the porch, she took a dramatic bow. "Everything," she added, from behind her mask, "everything, everything, well, almost everything about it" — she gulped a little pie that had fallen in from one corner of her mouth—"is appealing."

"Brava," I said, smiling. I had found my keys. "Now I'm out of here."

"Of course," she said, gesturing with her one pie-free hand. "Onward."

for Nietzchka Keene

(1952–2004)

Debarking

ira had been divorced for six months and still couldn't get his wedding ring off. His finger had swelled doughily — a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition was how he explained it. "I'm going to have to have my entire finger surgically removed," he told his friends. The ring (supposedly gold, though now that everything he had ever received from Marilyn had been thrown into doubt, who knew?) cinched the blowsy fat of his finger, which had grown twistedly around it like a fucking happy challah. "Maybe I should cut the whole hand off and send it to her," he said on the phone to his friend Mike, with whom he worked at the State Historical Society. "She'd understand the reference." Ira had already ceremoniously set fire to his dove-gray wedding tux — hanging it on a tall stick in his backyard, scarecrow style, and igniting it with a Bic lighter. "That sucker went up really fast," he gasped apologetically to the fire marshal, after the hedge caught, too — and before he was taken overnight to the local lockdown facility. "So fast. Maybe it was, I don't know, like the residual dry-cleaning fluid."

"You'll remove that ring when you're ready," Mike said now. Mike's job approving historical-preservation projects on old houses left him time to take a lot of lenient-parenting courses and to read all the lenient-parenting books, though he had no children himself. He did this for project-applicant-management purposes. "Here's what you do for your depression. I'm not going to say lose yourself in charity work. I'm not going to say get some perspective by watching our country's news every night and contemplating those worse off than yourself, those, say, who are about to be blown apart by bombs. I'm going to say this: Stop drinking, stop smoking. Eliminate coffee, sugar, dairy products. Do this for three days, then start everything back up again. Bam. I guarantee you, you will be so happy."

"I'm afraid," Ira said softly, "that the only thing that would make me happy right now is snipping the brake cables on Marilyn's car."

"Spring," Mike said helplessly, though it was still only the end of winter. "It can really hang you up the most."

"Hey. You should write songs. Just not too often." Ira looked at his hands. Actually, he had once got the ring off in a hot bath, but the sight of his finger, naked as a child's, had terrified him and he had shoved the ring back on.

He could hear Mike sighing and casting about. Cupboard doors closed loudly. The refrigerator puckered open then whooshed shut. Ira knew that Mike and Kate had had their troubles — as the phrase went — but their marriage had always held. "I'd divorce Kate," Mike had once confided timidly, "but she'd kill me."

"Look," Mike suggested, "why don't you come to our house Sunday for a little Lent dinner. We're having some people by, and who knows?"

"Who knows?" Ira asked.

"Yes — who knows."

"What's a Lent dinner?"

"We made it up. For Lent. We didn't really want to do Mardi Gras. Too disrespectful, given the international situation."

"So you're doing Lent. I'm unclear on Lent. I mean, I know what the word means to those of us of the Jewish faith. But we don't usually commemorate these transactions with meals. Usually there's just a lot of sighing."

"It's like a pre-Easter Prince of Peace dinner," Mike said slowly. "You're supposed to give things up for Lent. Last year, we gave up our faith and reason. This year, we're giving up our democratic voice and our hope."

Ira had already met most of Mike's goyisheh friends. Mike himself was low-key, tolerant, self-deprecating to a fault. A self-described "ethnic Catholic," he once complained dejectedly about not having been cute enough to be molested by a priest. "They would just shake my hand very quickly," he said. Mike's friends, however, tended to be tense, intellectually earnest Protestants who drove new, metallic-hued cars and who within five minutes of light conversation could be counted on to use the phrase "strictly within the framework of."

"Kate has a divorcee friend she's inviting," Mike said. "I'm not trying to fix you up. I really hate that stuff. I'm just saying come. Eat some food. It's almost Easter season and — well, hey, we could use a Jew over here." Mike laughed heartily.

"Yeah, I'll re-enact the whole thing for you," Ira said. He looked at his swollen ring finger again. "Yessirree. I'll come over and show you all how it's done."

ira's new house — though it was in what his real-estate agent referred to as "a lovely, pedestrian neighborhood," abutting the streets named after Presidents, but boasting instead streets named after fishing flies (Caddis, Hendrickson, Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear Road) — was full of slow drains, leaky gas burners, stopped-up sinks, and excellent dust for scrawling curse words. Marilyn blows sailors. The draftier windows Ira had duct-taped up with sheets of plastic on the inside, as instructed by Homeland Security; cold air billowed the plastic inward like sails on a ship. On a windy day it was quite something. "Your whole house could fly away," Mike said, looking around.

"Not really," Ira said lightly. "But it is spinning. It's very interesting, actually."

The yard had already grown muddy with March and the flower beds were greening with the tiniest sprigs of stinkweed and quack grass. By June, the chemical weapons of terrorism aimed at the heartland might prove effective in weeding the garden. "This may be the sort of war I could really use!" Ira said out loud to a neighbor.

Mike and Kate's house, on the other hand, with its perfect lines and friendly fussiness, reeking, he supposed, of historical-preservation tax credits, seemed an impossible dream to him, something plucked from a magazine article about childhood memories conjured on a deathbed. Something seen through the window by the Little Match Girl! Outside, the soffits were perfectly squared. The crocuses were like bells, and the Siberian violets like grape candies scattered in the grass. Soon their prize irises would become gorgeously crested cockatoos along the side yard. Inside, the smell of warm food almost made him weep. With his coat still on, he rushed past Kate to throw his arms around Mike, kissing him on both cheeks. "All the beautiful men must be kissed!" Ira exclaimed. After he'd got his coat off and wandered into the dining room, he toasted with the champagne that he himself had brought. There were eight guests there, most of whom he knew to some degree, but really that was enough. That was enough for everyone. They raised their glasses with him. "To Lent!" Ira cried. "To the final days!" And, in case that was too grim, he added, "And to the Resurrection! May it happen a little closer to home next time! Jesus Christ!" Soon he drifted back into the kitchen and, as he felt was required of him, shrieked at the pork. Then he began milling around again, apologizing for the crucifixion. "We really didn't intend it," he murmured. "Not really, not the killing part? We just kind of got carried away? You know how spring can get a little crazy, but, believe me, we're all really, really sorry."

Kate's divorced friend was named Zora and was a pediatrician. Although no one else did, she howled with laughter, and when her face wasn't blasted apart with it or her jaw snapping mutely open and shut like a pair of scissors (in what Ira recognized as post-divorce hysteria: "How long have you been divorced?" he later asked her. "Eleven years," she replied), Ira could see that she was very beautiful: short black hair; eyes a clear, reddish hazel, like orange pekoe tea; a strong aquiline nose; thick lashes that spiked out, wrought and black as the tines of a fireplace fork. Her body was a mixture of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage. Ira was working on a modest little volume of doggerel, its tentative title "Women from Venus, Men from — well — Penis."

Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.

When it was directed at him, the person just seemed so totally nice. And so Zora's laughter, in conjunction with her beauty, doomed him a little, made him grateful beyond reason.

immediately, he sent her a postcard, a photograph of newlyweds dragging empty Spam cans from the bumper of their car. He wrote: Dear Zora, Had such fun meeting you at Mike's. And then he wrote his phone number. He kept it simple. In courtship he had a history of mistakes, beginning at sixteen with his first girlfriend, for whom he had bought at the local head shop the coolest thing he had then ever seen in his life: a beautifully carved wooden hand with its middle finger sticking up. He himself had coveted it tremulously for a year. How could she not love it? Her contempt for it, and then for him, had left him feeling baffled and betrayed. With Marilyn, he had taken the other approach and played hard to get, which had turned their relationship into a never-ending Sadie Hawkins Day, with subsequent marriage to Sadie an inevitable ruin — a humiliating and interminable Dutch date.

But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct combination of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix — the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle — was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? The whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings: graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation with a colleague, punished with his wife's full-blown affair and false business trips (credit-union conventions that never took place) and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife produce and star in a fabulous one of her own he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.

He received a postcard from Zora in return. It was of van Gogh's room in Aries. Beneath the clock face of the local postmark her handwriting was big but careful, some curlicuing in the "g" s and "f" s. It read, Had such fun meeting you at Mike's. Wasn't that precisely, word for word, what he had written to her? There was no "too," no emphasized you, just exactly the same words thrown back at him like some lunatic postal Ping-Pong. Either she was stupid or crazy or he was already being too hard on her. Not being hard on people—"You bark at them," Marilyn used to say — was something he was trying to work on. When he pictured Zora's lovely face, it helped his tenuous affections. She had written her phone number and signed off with a swashbuckling "Z" — as in Zorro. That was cute, he supposed. He guessed. Who knew? He had to lie down.

he had bekka for the weekend. She sat in the living room, tuned to the Cartoon Network. Ira would sometimes watch her mesmerized face, as the cartoons flashed on the creamy screen of her skin, her eyes bright with reflected shapes caught there like holograms in marbles. He felt inadequate as her father, but he tried his best: affection, wisdom, reliability, plus not ordering pizza every visit, though tonight he had again caved in. Last week, Bekka had said to him, "When you and Mommy were married, we always had mashed potatoes for supper. Now you're divorced and we always have spaghetti."

"Which do you like better?" he'd asked.

"Neither!" she'd shouted, summing up her distaste for everything, marriage and divorce. "I hate them both."

Tonight, he had ordered the pizza half plain cheese and half with banana peppers and jalapeños. The two of them sat together in front of Justice League, eating slices from their respective sides. Chesty, narrow-waisted heroes in bright colors battled their enemies with righteous confidence and, of course, laser guns. Bekka finally turned to him. "Mommy says that if her boyfriend Daniel moves in I can have a dog. A dog and a bunny."

"And a bunny?" Ira said. When the family was still together, the four-year-old Bekka, new to numbers and the passage of time, used to exclaim triumphantly to her friends, "Mommy and Daddy say I can have a dog! When I turn eighteen!" There'd been no talk of bunnies. But perhaps the imminence of Easter had brought this on. He knew that Bekka loved animals. She had once, in a bath-time reverie, named her five favorite people, four of whom were dogs. The fifth was her own blue bike.

"A dog and a bunny," Bekka repeated, and Ira had to repress images of the dog with the rabbit's bloody head in its mouth.

"So, what do you think about that?" he asked cautiously, wanting to get her opinion on the whole Daniel thing.

Bekka shrugged and chewed. "Whatever," she said, her new word for "You're welcome,"

"Hello,"

"Goodbye," and "I'm only eight."

"I really just don't want all his stuff there. His car already blocks our car in the driveway."

"Bummer," Ira said, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore."

"I don't want a stepfather," Bekka said.

"Maybe he could just live on the steps," Ira said, and Bekka smirked, her mouth full of mozzarella.

"Besides," she said, "I like Larry better. He's stronger."

"Who's Larry?" Ira said, instead of "bummer."

"He's this other dude," Bekka said. She sometimes referred to her mother as a "dudette."

"Bummer," Ira said. "Big, big bummer."

he phoned zora four days later, so as not to seem pathetically eager. He summoned up his most confident acting. "Hi, Zora? This is Ira," he said, and then waited — narcissistically perhaps, but what else was there to say? — for her response.

"Ira?"

"Yes. Ira Milkins."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know who you are."

Ira gripped the phone and looked down at himself, suddenly finding nothing there. He seemed to have vanished from the neck down. "We met last Sunday at Mike and Kate's?" His voice quavered. If he ever actually succeeded in going out with her, he was going to have to take one of those date-rape drugs and just pass out on her couch.

"Ira? Ohhhhhhhhh — Ira. Yeah. The Jewish guy."

"Yeah, the Jew. That was me." Should he hang up now? He did not feel he could go on. But he must go on. There was a man of theatre for you.

"That was a nice dinner," she said.

"Yes, it was."

"I usually skip Lent completely."

"Me, too," Ira said. "It's just simpler. Who needs the fuss?"

"But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this."

Ira had to think about the way she'd used "conjoining." It sounded New Age-y and Amish, both.

"But Mike and Kate run that kind of home," she went on. "It's all warmth and good-heartedness."

Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, even if it was only a coat hanger. Mom. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house he'd tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz's imprinting experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up the incubation lights and cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort — the emotional limits of the Homo sapiens working Jewish mother — but it was soft science, and therefore less impressive.

"What kind of home do you run?" he asked.

"Home? Yeah, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I'm talking to you from a pup tent."

Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. "I love pup tents," he said. What was a pup tent, exactly? He'd forgotten.

"Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes."

Now there was silence. He couldn't imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or, rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the second-rate servants whom life had hired to take and bring her order.

"Well, would you like to meet for a drink?" Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of weariness and the cheery pseudo-professionalism of someone in the dully familiar position of being single and dating.

"Yes," Ira said. "That's exactly why I called."

"you can't imagine the daily drudgery of routine pediatrics," Zora said, not touching her wine. "Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Wope. Here's an exciting one: juvenile-onset diabetes. Day after day, you have to look into the parents' eyes and repeat the same exciting thing—'There are a lot of viruses going around.' I thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they'd gone into such a depressing field they all said, 'Because the kids don't get depressed.' That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don't get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children's books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog."

"Now, what's a hedgehog, exactly?" Ira was eyeing her full glass and his own empty one. "I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers."

"They're — well, what does it matter, if they're all wearing little polka-dot clothes, vests and hats and things?" she said irritably.

"I suppose," he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. They caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts, like "Why are these things called napkins rather than lapkins?" He tried to focus on the visuals, on her pumpkin-colored silk blouse, which he hesitated to compliment her on lest she think he was gay. Marilyn had threatened to call off their wedding because he had too strenuously admired the fabric of the gown she was having made; then he had shopped too long and discontentedly for his own tuxedo, failing to find just the right shade of "mourning dove," a color he had read about in a wedding magazine. "Are you homosexual?" she had asked. "You must tell me now. I won't make the same mistake my sister did."

Perhaps Zora's irritability was only job fatigue. Ira himself had creative hankerings. Though his position was with the Historical Society's human-resources office, he liked to help with the society's exhibitions, doing posters and dioramas and once even making a puppet for a little show about the state's first governor. Thank God for meaningful work! He understood those small, diaphanous artistic ambitions that overtook people and could look like nervous breakdowns.

"What happens in your hedgehog tale?" Ira asked, then settled in to finish up his dinner, eggplant parmesan that he now wished he hadn't ordered. He was coveting Zora's wodge of steak. Perhaps he had an iron deficiency. Or perhaps it was just a desire for the taste of metal and blood in his mouth. Zora, he knew, was committed to meat. While other people's cars were busy protesting the prospect of war or supporting the summoned troops, on her Honda Zora had a large bumper sticker that said, "Red meat is not bad for you. Fuzzy, greenish-blue meat is bad for you."

"The hedgehog tale? Well," Zora began, "the hedgehog goes for a walk because he is feeling sad — it's based on a story I used to tell my son. The hedgehog goes for a walk and comes upon this strange yellow house with a sign on it that says, 'Welcome, Hedgehog: This could be your new home,' and because he's been feeling sad the thought of a new home appeals to him. So he goes in and inside is a family of alligators — well, I'll spare you the rest, but you can get the general flavor of it from that."

"I don't know about that family of alligators."

She was quiet for a minute, chewing her beautiful ruby steak. "Every family is a family of alligators," she said.

"Alligators. Well — that's certainly one way of looking at it." Ira glanced at his watch.

"Yeah. To get back to the book. It gives me an outlet. I mean, my job's not terrible. Some of the kids are cute. But some are impossible, of course. Some are disturbed, and some are just spoiled and ill-behaved. It's hard to know what to do. We're not allowed to hit them."

"You're 'not allowed to hit them'?" He could see that she had now made some progress with her wine.

"I'm from Kentucky," she said.

"Ah." He drank from his water glass, stalling.

She chewed thoughtfully. Merlot was beginning to etch a ragged, scabby line in the dried skin of her bottom lip. "It's like Ireland but with more horses and guns."

"Not a lot of Jews down there." He had no idea why he said half the things he said. Perhaps this time it was because he had once been a community-based historian, digging in archives for the genealogies and iconographies of various ethnic groups, not realizing that other historians generally thought this a sentimental form of history, shedding light on nothing; and though shedding light on nothing didn't seem a bad idea to him, when it became available he had taken the human-resources job.

"Not too many," she said. "I did know an Armenian family, growing up. At least I think they were Armenian."

When the check came, she ignored it, as if it were some fly that had landed and would soon be taking off again. So much for feminism. Ira pulled out his state worker's credit card and the waitress came by and whisked it away. There were, he was once told, four seven-word sentences that generally signalled the end of a relationship. The first was "I think we should see other people" (which always meant another seven-word sentence: "I am already sleeping with someone else"). The second seven-word sentence was, reputedly, "Maybe you could just leave the tip." The third was "How could you forget your wallet again?" And the fourth, the killer of all killers, was "Oh, look, I've forgotten my wallet, too!"

He did not imagine that they would ever see each other again. But when he dropped her off at her house, walking her to the door, she suddenly grabbed his face with both hands, and her mouth became its own wet creature exploring his. She opened up his jacket, pushing her body inside it, against his, the pumpkin-colored silk of her blouse rubbing on his shirt. Her lips came away in a slurp. "I'm going to call you," she said, smiling. Her eyes were wild with something, as if with gin, though she had only been drinking wine.

"O.K.," he mumbled, walking backward down her steps in the dark, his car still running, its headlights bright along her street.

the following week, he was in Zora's living room. It was beige and white with cranberry accents. On the walls were black-framed photos of her son, Bruno, at all ages. There were pictures of Bruno lying on the ground. There were pictures of Bruno and Zora together, the boy hidden in the folds of her skirt, Zora hanging her then long hair down into his face, covering him completely. There he was again, naked, leaning in between her knees like a cello. There were pictures of him in the bath, though in some he was clearly already at the start of puberty. In the corner of the room stood perhaps a dozen wooden sculptures of naked boys that Zora had carved herself. "One of my hobbies, which I was telling you about," she said. They were astounding little things. She had drilled holes in their penises with a brace-and-bit to allow for water in case she could someday sell them as garden fountains. "These are winged boys. The beautiful adolescent boy who flies away. It's from mythology. I forget what they're called. I just love their little rumps." He nodded, studying the tight, sculpted buttocks, the spouted, mushroomy phalluses, the long backs and limbs. So: this was the sort of woman he'd been missing out on, not being single all these years. What had he been thinking of, staying married for so long?

He sat down and asked for wine. "You know, I'm just a little gun shy romantically," he said apologetically. "I don't have the confidence I used to. I don't think I can take my clothes off in front of another person. Not even at the gym, frankly. I've been changing in the toilet stalls. After divorce and all."

"Oh, divorce will do that to you totally," she said reassuringly. She poured him some wine. "It's like a trick. It's like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, 'Stand there.' And so you do. Then boom!" From a drawer in a china hutch, she took out a pipe, loaded it with hashish from a packet of foil, then lit it, inhaling. She gave it to him. "I've never seen a pediatrician smoke hashish before."

"Really?" she said, with some difficulty, her breath still sucked in.

the nipples of her breasts were long, cylindrical, and stiff, so that her chest looked as if two small plungers had flown across the room and suctioned themselves there. His mouth opened hungrily to kiss them.

"Perhaps you would like to take off your shoes," she whispered.

"Oh, no," he said.

There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew people but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.

"Where are you?" Ira said in the dark. He decided that in a case such as this he could feel a chaste and sanctifying distance. It wasn't he who was having sex. The condom was having sex and he was just trying to stop it. Zora's candles on the nightstand were heated to clear pools in their tins. They flickered smokily. He tried not to think about how, before she had even lit them and pulled back the bedcovers, he had noticed that they were already melted down to the thickness of buttons, their wicks blackened to a crisp. It was not good to think about the previous burning of the bedroom candles of a woman who had just unzipped your pants. Besides, he was too grateful for those candles — especially with all those little wonder boys in the living room. Perhaps by candlelight his whitening chest hair would not look so white. This was what candles were made for: the sad, sexually shy, out-of-shape, middle-aged him. How had he not understood this in his marriage? Zora herself looked ageless, like a nymph, with her short hair, although once she got his glasses off she became a blur of dim and shifting shapes and might as well have been Dick Cheney or Lon Chaney or the Blob, except that she smelled good and, but for the occasional rough patch, had the satiny skin of a girl.

She let out a long, spent sigh.

"Where did you go?" he asked again anxiously.

"I've been right here, silly," she said, and pinched his hip. She lifted one of her long legs up and down outside the covers. "Did you get off?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Did you get off?"

"Get off?" Someone else had asked him the same question once, when he stopped in the jetway to tie his shoe after debarking from a plane.

"Have an orgasm. With some men it's not always clear."

"Yes, thank you. I mean, it was — to me — very clear."

"You're still wearing your wedding ring," she said.

"It's stuck, I don't know why—"

"Let me get at that thing," she said, and pulled hard on his finger, but the loose skin around his knuckle bunched up and blocked the ring, abrading his hand.

"Ow," he finally said.

"Perhaps later with soap," she said. She lay back and swung her legs up in the air again.

"Do you like to dance?" he asked.

"Sometimes," she said.

"I'll bet you're a wonderful dancer."

"Not really," she said. "But I can always think of things to do."

"That's a nice trait."

"You think so?" and she leaned in and began tickling him.

"I don't think I'm ticklish," he said.

"Oh." She stopped.

"I mean, I probably am a little" he added, "just not a lot."

"I'd like you to meet my son," she said.

"Is he here?"

"Sure. He's under the bed. Bruny?" Oh, these funny ones were funny. "No. He's with his dad this week."

The extended families of divorce. Ira tried not to feel jealous. It was quite possible that he was not mature enough to date a divorced woman. "Tell me about his dad."

"His dad? His dad is another pediatrician, but he was really into English country dancing. Where eventually he met a lass. Alas."

Ira would put that in his book of verse. Alas, a lass. "I don't think anyone should dance in a way that's not just regular dancing," Ira said. "It's not normal. That's just my opinion."

"Well, he left a long time ago. He said he'd made a terrible mistake getting married. He said that he just wasn't capable of intimacy. I know that's true for some people, but I'd never actually heard anyone say it out loud about themselves."

"I know," Ira said. "Even Hitler never said that! I mean, I don't mean to compare your ex to Hitler as a leader. Only as a man."

Zora stroked his arm. "Do you feel ready to meet Bruno? I mean, he didn't care for my last boyfriend at all. That's why we broke up."

"Really?" This silenced him for a moment. "If I left those matters up to my daughter, I'd be dating a beagle."

"I believe children come first." Her voice now had a steely edge.

"Oh, yes, yes, so do I," Ira said quickly. He felt suddenly paralyzed and cold.

She reached into the nightstand drawer, took out a vial, and bit into a pill. "Here, take half," she said. "Otherwise we won't get any sleep at all. Sometimes I snore. Probably you do, too."

"This is so cute," Ira said warmly. "Our taking these pills together."

he staggered through his days, tired and unsure. At the office, he misplaced files. Sometimes he knocked things over by accident — a glass of water or the benefits manual. The buildup to war, too, was taking its toll. He lay in bed at night, the moments before sleep a kind of stark acquaintance with death. What had happened to the world? It was mid-March now, but it still did not look like spring, especially with the plastic sheeting duct-taped to his windows. When he tried to look out, the trees seemed to be pasted onto the waxy dinge of a still wintry sky. He wished that this month shared its name with a less military verb. Why "March"? How about a month named Skip? That could work.

He got a couple of cats from the pound so that Bekka could have some live pet action at his house, too. He and Bekka went to the store and stocked up on litter and cat food.

"Provisions!" Ira exclaimed.

"In case the war comes here, we can eat the cat food," Bekka suggested.

"Cat food, heck. We can eat the cats," Ira said.

"That's disgusting, Dad."

Ira shrugged.

"You see, that's one of the things Mom didn't like about you!" she added.

"Really? She said that?"

"Sort of."

"Mom likes me. She's just very busy."

"Yeah. Whatever."

He got back to the cats. "What should we name them?"

"I don't know." She studied the cats.

Ira hated the precious literary names that people gave pets — characters from opera and Proust. When he first met Marilyn, she had a cat named Portia, but he had insisted on calling it Fang.

"I think we should name them Snowball and Snowflake," Bekka said, looking glassy-eyed at the two golden tabbies. In the pound, someone with nametag duty had named them "Jake" and "Fake Jake," but the quotation marks around their names seemed an invitation to change them.

"They don't look like a snowball or a snowflake," Ira said, trying not to let his disappointment show. Sometimes Bekka seemed completely banal to him. She had spells of inexplicable and vapid conventionality. He had always wanted to name a cat Bowser. "How about Bowser and Bowsee?"

"Fireball and Fireflake," Bekka tried again.

Ira looked at her, he hoped, beseechingly and persuasively. "Are you sure? Fireball and Fireflake don't really sound like cats that would belong to you."

Bekka's face clenched tearily. "You don't know me! I only live with you part time! The rest of the time I live with Mom, and she doesn't know me, either! The only person who knows me is me!"

"O.K., O.K.," Ira said. The cats were eyeing him warily. In time of war, never argue with a fireball or a fireflake. Never argue with the food. "Fireball and Fireflake."

What were those? Two divorced middle-aged people on a date?

"why don't you come to dinner?" Zora phoned one afternoon. "I'm making spring spaghetti, Bruny's favorite, and you can come over and meet him. Unless you have Bekka tonight."

"What is spring spaghetti?" Ira asked.

"Oh, it's the same as regular spaghetti — you just serve it kind of lukewarm. Room temperature. With a little fresh basil."

"What should I bring?"

"Perhaps you could just bring a small appetizer and some dessert," she said. "And maybe a salad, some bread if you're close to a bakery, and a bottle of wine. Also an extra chair, if you have one. We'll need an extra chair."

"O.K.," he said.

He was a little loaded down at the door. She stepped outside, he thought to help him, but she simply put her arms around him. "I have to kiss you outside. Bruny doesn't like to see that sort of thing." She kissed Ira in a sweet, rubbery way on the mouth. Then she stepped back in, smiling, holding the door open for him. Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually better-looking than other people. Dating proved it! The aluminum foil over his salad was sliding off, and the brownies he had made for dessert were still warm underneath the salad bowl, heating and wilting the lettuce. He attempted a familiar and proprietary stride through Zora's living room, though he felt neither, then dumped everything on her kitchen table.

"Thank you," she said, and placed her hand on the small of his back. He was deeply attracted to her. There was nothing he could do about that.

"It smells good," he said. "You smell good." Some mix of garlic and citrus and baby powder overlaid with nutmeg. Her hand wandered down and stroked his behind. "I've got to run back out to the car and get the appetizer and the chair," he said, and made a quick dash. When he came back in, he handed her the appetizer — a dish of herbed olives (he knew nothing about food; someone at work had told him you could never go wrong with herbed olives: "Spell it out. H-e-r b-e-d. Get it?"). He then set the chair up at Zora's little dining table for two (he'd never seen one not set up for at least four). Zora looked brightly at him and whispered, "Are you ready to meet Bruny?"

Ready. He did not know precisely what she meant by that. It seemed that she had reversed everything, that she should be asking Bruno, or Bruny, if he was ready to meet him. "Ready," he said.

There was wavery flute-playing behind a closed door down the hallway. "Bruny?" Zora called. The music stopped. Suddenly a barking, howling voice called, "What?"

"Come out and meet Ira, please."

There was silence. Nobody moved at all for a very long time. Ira smiled politely. "Oh, let him play," he said.

"I'll be right back," Zora said, and she headed down the hall to Bruno's room, knocked on the door, then went in, closing it behind her. Ira stood there for a while, then he picked up the Screwpull, opened the bottle of wine, and began to drink. After several minutes, Zora returned to the kitchen, sighing, "Bruny's in a little bit of a mood." Suddenly a door slammed and soft, trudging footsteps brought Bruno, the boy himself, into the kitchen. He was barefoot and in a T-shirt and gym shorts, his legs already dark with hair. His eyebrows sprouted in a manly black V over the bridge of his nose. He was not tall but he was muscular, broad-shouldered, and thick-limbed. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the wall with weary belligerence.

"Bruny, this is Ira," Zora said. Ira put his wineglass down and extended his hand. Bruno unfolded his arms, but did not shake hands. Instead, he thrust out his chin and scowled. Ira picked up his wineglass again.

"Good to meet you. Your mother has said a lot of wonderful things about you."

Bruno looked at the appetizer bowl. "What's all this grassy gunk all over the olives." It was not really a question, so no one answered it.

Bruno turned back to his mother. "May I go back to my room now?"

"Yes, dear," Zora said. She looked at Ira. "He's practicing for the woodwind competition next Saturday. He's very serious."

When Bruno had tramped back down to his room, Ira leaned in to kiss Zora, but she pulled away. "Bruny might hear us," she whispered.

"Let's go to a restaurant. Just you and me. My salad's no good."

"Oh, we couldn't leave Bruno here alone. He's only sixteen."

"I was working in a steel factory when I was sixteen!" Ira decided not to say. Instead, he said, "Doesn't he have friends?"

"He's between social groups right now," Zora said defensively. "It's difficult for him to find other kids who are as intellectually serious as he is."

"We'll rent him a movie," Ira said. "Excuse me, a film. A foreign film, since he's serious. A documentary. We'll rent him a foreign documentary!"

"We don't have a VCR."

"You don't have a VCR?" At this point, Ira found the silverware and helped set the table. When they sat down to eat, Bruno suddenly came out and joined them. The spring spaghetti was tossed in a large glass bowl with grated cheese. "Just how you like it, Brune," Zora said.

"So, Bruno. What grade are you in?"

Bruno rolled his eyes. "Tenth," he said.

"So college is a ways off," Ira said, accidentally thinking out loud.

"I guess," Bruno said.

"What classes are you taking in school, besides music?" Ira asked, after a long awkward spell.

"I don't take music," Bruno said with his mouth full. "I'm in All-State Woodwinds."

"All-State Woodwinds! Interesting! Do you take any courses like, say, American history?"

"They're studying the Amazon rain forest yet again," Zora said. "They've been studying it since pre-school."

Ira slurped with morose heartiness at his wine — he had spent too much of his life wandering about in the desert of his own drool; oh, the mealtime games he had played on his own fragile mind — and now some wine dribbled on his shirt. "For Pete's sake, look at this." He dabbed at it with his napkin and looked up at Bruno with an ingratiating grin. "Someday this could happen to you," Ira said, twinkling in Bruno's direction.

"That would never happen to me," Bruno muttered.

Ira continued dabbing at his shirt. He began thinking of his book. Though I be your mother's beau, no rival I, no foe, faux foe. He loved rhymes. They were harmonious and joyous in the face of total crap.

Soon Bruno was gently tapping his foot against his mother's under the table. Zora began playfully to nudge him back, and then they were both kicking away, their energetic footsie causing them to slip in their chairs a little, while Ira pretended not to notice, cutting his salad with the edge of his fork, too frightened to look up. After a few minutes — when the footsie had stopped and Ira had exclaimed, "Great dinner, Zora!" — they all stood and cleared their places, taking the dishes into the kitchen, putting them in a messy pile in the sink. Ira began halfheartedly to run warm water over them while Zora and Bruno, some distance behind him, jostled up against each other, ramming lightly into each other's sides. Ira glanced over his shoulder and saw Zora step back and assume a wrestler's starting stance as Bruno leaped toward her, heaving her over his shoulder, then ran into the living room, where, Ira could see, he dumped her, laughing, on the couch.

Should Ira join in? Should he leave?

"I can still pin you, Brune, when we're on the bed," Zora said.

"Yeah, right," Bruno said.

Perhaps it was time to go. Next time, Ira would bring over a VCR for Bruno and just take Zora out to eat. "Well, look at the clock! Good to meet you, Bruno," he said, shaking the kid's large limp hand. Zora stood, out of breath. She walked Ira out to his car, helping to carry his chair and salad bowl. "It was a lovely evening," Ira said. "And you are a lovely woman. And your son seems so bright and the two of you are adorable together."

Zora beamed, seemingly mute with happiness. If only Ira had known how to speak such fanciful baubles during his marriage, surely Marilyn would never have left him.

He gave Zora a quick kiss on the cheek — the heat of wrestling had heightened her beautiful nutmeg smell — then kissed her again on the neck, near her ear. Alone in his car on the way home, he thought of all the deeply wrong erotic attachments that were made in wartime, all the crazy romances cooked up quickly by the species to offset death. He turned the radio on: the news of the Middle East was so surreal and bleak that when he heard the tonnage of the bombs planned for Baghdad he could feel his jaw fall slack in astonishment. He pulled the car over, turned on the interior light, and gazed in the rearview mirror just to see what his face looked like in this particular state. He had felt his face drop in this manner once before, when he first got the divorce papers from Marilyn — now, there was shock and awe for you; there was decapitation—but he had never actually seen what he looked like this way. So. Now he knew. Not good: stunned, pale, and not all that bright. It wasn't the same as self-knowledge, but life was long and not that edifying, and one sometimes had to make do with these randomly seized tidbits.

He started up again, slowly; it was raining now, and, at a shimmeringly lit intersection of two gas stations, one Quik-Trip, and a KFC, half a dozen young people in hooded yellow slickers were holding up signs that read "Honk for Peace." Ira fell upon his horn, first bouncing his hand there, then just leaning his whole arm into it. Other cars began to do the same, and soon no one was going anywhere — a congregation of mourning doves! but honking like geese in a wild chorus of futility, windshield wipers clearing their fan-shaped spaces on the drizzled night glass. No car went anywhere for the change of two lights. For all its stupidity and solipsism and self-consciously scenic civic grief, it was something like a gorgeous moment.

despite bekka's reading difficulties, despite her witless naming of the cats, Ira knew that his daughter was highly intelligent. He knew it from the time she spent lying around the house, bored and sighing, saying, "Dad? When will childhood be over?" This was a sign of genius! As were other things. Her complete imperviousness to the adult male voice, for instance. Her scrutiny of all food. With interest and hesitancy, she studied the antiwar signs that bestrewed the neighborhood lawns. "'War Is Not the Path to Peace,'" she read slowly aloud. Then added, "Well — duh."

"'War Is Not the Answer,'" she read on another. "Well, that doesn't make sense," she said to Ira. "War is the answer. It's the answer to the question 'What's George Bush going to start real soon?'"

The times Bekka stayed at his house, she woke up in the morning and told him her dreams. "I had a dream last night that I was walking with two of my friends and we met a wolf. But I made a deal with the wolf. I said, 'Don't eat me. These other two have more meat on them.' And the wolf said, 'O.K.,' and we shook on it and I got away." Or, "I had a strange dream last night that I was a bad little fairy."

She was in contact with her turmoil and with her ability to survive. How could that be anything less than emotional brilliance?

One morning she said, "I had a really scary dream. There was this tornado with a face inside? And I married it." Ira smiled. "It may sound funny to you, Dad, but it was really scary."

He stole a look at her school writing journal once and found this poem:

Time moving

Time standing still.

What is the difference?

Time standing still is the difference.

He had no idea what it meant, but he knew that it was awesome. He had given her the middle name Clio, after the Muse of history, so of course she would know very well that time standing still was the difference. He personally felt that he was watching history from the dimmest of backwaters — a land of beer and golf, the horizon peacefully fish-gray. With the windows covered in plastic sheeting, he felt as if he were inside a plastic container, like a leftover, peering into the tallow fog of the world. Time moving. Time standing still.

the major bombing started on the first day of spring. "It's happening," Ira said into Mike's answering machine. "The whole thing is starting now."

Zora called and asked him to the movies. "Sure," Ira said mechanically. "I'd love to."

"Well, we were thinking of this Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but Bruno would also be willing to see the Mel Gibson one." We. He was dating a tenth grader now. Even in tenth grade he hadn't done that. Well, he'd see what he'd missed.

They picked him up at six-forty, and, as Bruno made no move to cede the front seat, Ira sat in the back of Zora's Honda, his long legs wedged together at a diagonal, like a lady riding sidesaddle. Zora drove carefully, not like a mad hellcat at all, as for some reason he had thought she would. As a result, they were late for the Mel Gibson movie and had to make do with the Schwarzenegger. Ira thrust money at the ticket-seller—"Three, please" — and they all wordlessly went in, their computerized stubs in hand. "So you like Arnold Schwarzenegger?" Ira said to Bruno as they headed down the red-carpeted corridor.

"Not really," Bruno muttered. Bruno sat between Zora and Ira, and together they passed a small container of popcorn back and forth. Ira jumped up twice to refill it out in the lobby, a kind of relief for him from Arnold, whose line readings were less brutish than they used to be but not less brutish enough. Afterward, heading out into the parking lot, Bruno and Zora re-enacted body-bouncing scenes from the film. When they reached the car, Ira was again relegated to the back seat. "Shall we go to dinner?" he called up to the front.

Both Zora and Bruno were silent.

"Shall we?" he tried again, cheerfully.

"Would you like to, Bruno?" Zora asked. "Are you hungry?"

"I don't know," Bruno said, peering gloomily out the window.

"Did you like the movie?" Ira asked.

Bruno shrugged. "I don't know."

They went to a barbecue place and got ribs and chicken. "Let me pay for this," Ira said, though Zora hadn't offered.

"Oh, O.K.," she said.

Afterward, Zora dropped Ira at the curb, where he stood for a minute, waving, in front of his house. He watched them roll down to the end of the block and disappear around the corner. He went inside and made himself a drink with cranberry juice and rum. He turned on the TV news and watched the bombing. Night bombing, so you could not really see.

a few mornings later was the first day of a new month. The illusion of time flying, he knew, was to make people think that life could have more in it than it actually could. Time flying could make human lives seem victorious over time itself. Time flew so fast that in ways it failed to make an impact. People's lives fell between its stabbing powers like insects between raindrops. "We cheat the power of time with our very brevity!" he said aloud to Bekka, feeling confident that she would understand, but she just kept petting the cats. The house had already begun to fill with the acrid-honey smell of cat pee, though neither he nor Bekka seemed to mind. Spring! One more month and it would be May, his least favorite. Why not a month named Can? Or Must! Well, maybe not Must. Zora phoned him early, with a dour tone. "I don't know. I think we should break up," she said.

"You do?"

"Yes, I don't see that this is going anywhere. Things aren't really moving forward in any way that I can understand. And I don't think we should waste each other's time."

"Really?" Ira was dumbfounded.

"It may be fine for some, but dinner, a movie, and sex is not my idea of a relationship."

"Maybe we could eliminate the movie?" he asked desperately.

"We're adults—"

"True. I mean, we are?"

"— and what is the point of continuing, if there are clear obstacles or any unclear idea of where this is headed? It becomes difficult to maintain faith. We've hardly begun seeing each other, I realize, but already I just don't envision us as a couple."

"I'm sorry to hear you say that." He was now sitting down in his kitchen. He could feel himself trying not to cry.

"Let's just move on," she said with gentle firmness.

"Really? Is that honestly what you think? I feel terrible."

"April Fool's!" she cried out into the phone.

His heart rose to his throat then sank to his colon then bobbed back up close to the surface of his rib cage where his right hand was clutching at it. Were there paddles nearby that could be applied to his chest?

"I beg your pardon?" he asked faintly.

"April Fool's," she said again, laughing. "It's April Fool's Day."

"I guess," he said, gasping a little, "I guess that's the kind of joke that gets better the longer you think about it."

he had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but now more than ever he was convinced that there should be strong international laws against their being too physically attractive. The public's safety was at risk!

"How are you liking Zora?" Mike asked over a beer, after they'd mulled over the war and the details of Dick Cheney's tax return, which had just been printed in the paper. Why wasn't there a revolution? Was everyone too distracted with tennis and sex and tulip bulbs? Marxism in the spring lacked oomph. Ira had just hired someone to paint his house, so now on his front lawn he had two signs: "War Is Not the Answer" in blue and, on the other side of the lawn, in black and yellow, "Jenkins Painting Is the Answer."

"Oh, Zora's great." Ira paused. "Great. Just great. In fact, do you perhaps know any other single women?"

"Really?"

"Well, it's just that she might not be all that mentally well." He thought about the moment, just the night before, at dinner, when she'd said, "I love your mouth most when it does that odd grimace thing in the middle of sex," and then she contorted her face so hideously that Ira felt as if he'd been struck. Later in the evening, she'd said, "Watch this," and she'd taken her collapsible umbrella, placed its handle on the crotch of her pants, then pressed the button that sent it rocketing out, unfurled, like a cartoon erection. Ira did not know who or what she was, though he wanted to cut her some slack, give her a break, bestow upon her the benefit of the doubt — all those paradoxical cliches of supposed generosity, most of which he had denied his wife. He tried not to believe that the only happiness he was fated for had already occurred, had been with Bekka and Marilyn, when the three of them were together. A hike, a bike ride — he tried not to think that this crazy dream of family had shown its sweet face just long enough to torment him for the rest of his life, though scarcely long enough to sustain him through a meal. Torturing oneself with the idea of family happiness while not actually having a family, he decided, might be a fairly new circumstance in social history. People had probably not been like this a hundred years ago. He imagined an exhibit at the society. He imagined the puppets.

"Sanity's conjectural," Mike said. His brow furrowed thoughtfully. "Zora's very attractive, don't you think?"

Ira thought of her beautiful, slippery skin, the dark, sweet hair, the lithe sylph's body, the mad, hysterical laugh. She had once, though only briefly, insisted that Man Ray and Ray Charles were brothers. "She is attractive," Ira said. "But you say that like it's a good thing."

"Right now," Mike said, "I feel like anything that isn't about killing people is a good thing."

"This may be about that," Ira said.

"Oh, I see. Now we're entering the callow, glib part of spring."

"She's wack, as the kids say."

Mike looked confused. "Is that like wacko?"

"Yes. But not like Waco—at least not yet. I would stop seeing her, but I don't seem to be able to. Especially now, with all that's happening in the world, I can't live without some intimacy, companionship, whatever you want to call it, to face down this global insanity."

"You shouldn't use people as human shields." Mike paused. "Or — I don't know — maybe you should."

"I can't let go of hope, of the illusion that something is going to come out of this romance. I'm sorry. Divorce is a trauma, believe me, I know. It's death within life! Its pain is a national secret! But that's not it. I can't let go of love. I can't live without some scrap of it. Hold my hand," Ira said. His eyes were starting to water. Once, when he was a small child, he had got lost, and when his mother had finally found him, four blocks from home, she'd asked him if he'd been scared. "Not really," he had said, sniffling pridefully. "But then my eyes just suddenly started to water."

"I beg your pardon?" Mike asked.

"I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand," Ira said, but Mike had already taken it.

on the bright side, the hashish was good. The sleeping pills were good. He was walking slowly around the halls at work in what was a combination of serene energy and a nap. With his birthday coming up, he went to the doctor for his triannual annual physical and, having mentioned a short list of nebulous symptoms, he was given dismissive diagnoses of "benign vertigo," "pseudo gout," or perhaps "migraine aura," the names, no doubt, of rock bands. "You've got the pulse of a boy, and the mind of a boy, too," his doctor, an old golfing friend, said.

Health, Ira decided, was notional. Palm Sunday — all these goyim festivals were preprinted on his calendar — was his birthday, and when Zora called he blurted out that information. "It is?" she said. "You old man! Are you feeling undernookied? I'll come over Sunday and read your palm." Wasn't she cute? Damn it, she was cute. She arrived with Bruno and a chocolate cake in tow. "Happy birthday," she said. "Bruno helped me make the frosting."

"Did you, now?" he said to Bruno, patting him on the back in a brotherly embrace, which the boy attempted to duck and slide out from under.

They ordered Chinese food and talked about high school, advanced-placement courses, homeroom teachers, and lames Galway (soulful mick or soulless dork, who could decide?). Zora brought out the cake. There were no candles, so Ira lit a match, stuck it upright in the frosting, and blew it out. His wish was a vague and general one of good health for Bekka. No one but her. He had put nobody else in his damn wish. Not the Iraqi people, not the G.I.s, not Mike, who had held his hand, not Zora. This kind of focussed intensity was bad for the planet.

"Shall we sit on Bruno?" Zora was laughing and backing her sweet tush into Bruno, who was now sprawled out on Ira's sofa, protesting in a grunting way. "Come on!" she called to Ira. "Let's sit on Bruno."

Ira began making his way toward the liquor cabinet. He believed there was some bourbon in there. He would not need ice. "Would you care for some bourbon?" he called over to Zora, who was now wrestling with Bruno. She looked up at Ira and said nothing. Bruno, too, looked at him and said nothing.

Ira continued to pour. At this point, he was both drinking bourbon and eating cake. He had a pancreas like a rock. "We should probably go," Zora said. "It's a school night."

"Oh, O.K.," Ira said, swallowing. "I mean, I wish you didn't have to."

"School. What can you do? I'm going to take the rest of the cake home for Bruny's lunch tomorrow. It's his favorite."

Heat and sorrow filled Ira's face. The cake had been her only present to him. He closed his eyes and nuzzled his head into hers. "Not now," she whispered. "He gets upset."

"Oh, O.K.," he said. "I'll walk you out to the car." And there he gave her a quick hug before she walked around the car and got in on the driver's side. He stepped back onto the curb and knocked on Bruno's window to say goodbye. But the boy would not turn. He flipped his hand up, showing Ira the back of it.

"Bye! Thank you for sharing my birthday with me!" Ira called out. Where affection fell on its ass, politeness might rise to the occasion. Zora's Honda lights went on, then the engine, and then the whole vehicle flew down the street.

at the cuckoo private school to which Marilyn had years ago insisted on sending Bekka, the students and teachers were assiduously avoiding talk of the war. Bekka's class was doing finger-knitting while simultaneously discussing their hypothetical stock-market investments. The class was doing best with preferred stocks in Kraft, G.E., and G.M.; watching them move slightly every morning on the Dow Jones was also helping their little knitted scarves. It was a right-brain, left-brain thing. For this, Ira forked over nine thousand dollars a year. Not that he really cared. As long as Bekka was in a place safe from death — the alerts were moving from orange to red to orange; no information, just duct tape and bright, warm, mind-wrecking colors — turning her into a knitting stock-broker was O.K. with him. Exploit the system, man! he himself used to say, in college. He could, however, no longer watch TV. He packed it up, along with the VCR, and brought the whole thing over to Zora's. "Here," he said. "This is for Bruno."

"You are so sweet," she said, and kissed his ear. Possibly he was in love with her.

"The TV's broken," Ira said to Bekka, when she came that weekend and asked about it. "It's in the shop."

"Whatever," Bekka said, pulling her scarf yarn along the floor so the cats could play.

the next time he picked Zora up to go out, she said, "Come on in. Bruno's watching a movie on your VCR."

"Does he like it? Should I say hello to him?"

Zora shrugged. "If you want."

He stepped into the house, but the TV was not in the living room. It was in Zora's bedroom, where, spread out half naked on Zora's bedspread, as Ira had been just a few days before, lay Bruno. He was watching Bergman's The Magic Flute.

"Hi, Brune," he said. The boy said nothing, transfixed, perhaps not hearing him. Zora came in and pressed a cold glass of water against the back of Bruno's thigh.

"Yow!" Bruno cried.

"Here's your water," Zora said, walking her fingers up his legs.

Bruno took it and placed it on the floor. The singing on the same television screen that had so recently brought Ira the fiery bombing of Baghdad seemed athletic and absurd, perhaps a kind of joke. But Bruno remained riveted. "Well, enjoy the show," Ira said. He hadn't really expected to be thanked for the TV, but now actually knowing that he wouldn't be made him feel a little crestfallen.

On the way back out, Ira noticed that Zora had added two new sculptures to the collection in the living room. They were more abstract, made entirely out of old recorders and wooden flutes, but were recognizably boys, priapic with piccolos. "A flute would have been too big," Zora explained.

At the restaurant, the sound system was playing Dinah Washington singing "For All We Know." The walls, like love, were trompe-l'oeil — walls painted like viewful windows, though only a fool wouldn't know that they were walls. The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome things — cheeks, tongues, thymus glands. The candle, like love, flickered, reflected in the brass tops of the sugar bowl and the salt and pepper shakers. He tried to capture Zora's gaze, which seemed to be darting around the room. "It's so nice to be here with you," he said. She turned and fixed him with a smile, repaired him with it. She was a gentle, lovely woman. Something in him kept coming stubbornly back to that. Here they were, two lonely adults lucky to have found each other, even if it was just for the time being. But now tears were drizzling down her face. Her mouth, collecting them in its corners, was retreating into a pinch.

"Oh, no, what's the matter?" He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away to hide her eyes behind it.

"I just miss Bruny," she said.

He could feel his heart go cold, despite himself. Oh, well. Tomorrow was Easter. Much could rise from the dead. Yesterday had been "Good Friday." Was this all cultural sarcasm — like "Labor Day" or "Some Enchanted Evening"?

"Don't you think he's fine?" Ira tried to focus.

"It's just — I don't know. It's probably just me coming off my antidepressants."

"You've been on antidepressants?" he asked sympathetically.

"Yes, I was."

"You were on them when I first met you?" Perhaps he had wandered into a whole "Flowers for Algernon" thing.

"Yes, indeedy. I went on them two years ago, after my 'nervous breakdown.'" Here she raised two fingers, to do quotation marks, but all of her fingers inadvertently sprang up and her hands clawed the air.

He didn't know what he should say. "Would you like me to take you home?"

"No, no, no. Oh, maybe you should. I'm sorry. It's just I feel I have so little time with him now. He's growing up so fast. I just wish I could go back in time." She blew her nose.

"I know what you mean."

"You know, once I was listening to some friends talk about travelling in the Pacific. They left Australia early one morning and arrived in California the evening of the day before. And I thought, I'd like to do that — keep crossing the international date line and get all the way back to when Bruno was a little boy again."

"Yeah," Ira said. "I'd like to get back to the moment where I signed my divorce agreement. I have a few changes I'd like to make."

"You'd have to bring a pen," she said strangely.

He studied her, to memorize her face. "I would never time-travel without a pen," he said.

She paused. "You look worried," she said. "You shouldn't do that with your forehead. It makes you look old." Then she began to sob.

He found her coat and drove her home and walked her to the door. Above the house, the hammered nickel of the moon gave off a murky shine. "It's a hard time in the world right now," Ira said. "It's hard on everybody. Go in and make yourself a good stiff drink. People don't drink they way they used to. That's what started this whole Iraq thing to begin with: it's a war of teetotallers. People have got to get off their wagons and high horses and—" He kissed her forehead. "I'll call you tomorrow," he said, though he knew he wouldn't.

She squeezed his arm and said, "Sleep well."

As he backed out of her driveway, he could see Bruno laid out in a shirtless stupor on Zora's bed, the TV firing its colorful fire. He could see Zora come in, sit down, cuddle close to Bruno, put her arm around him, and rest her head on his shoulder.

Ira brusquely swung the car away. Was this his problem? Was he too old-fashioned? He had always thought he was a modern man. He knew, for instance, how to stop and ask for directions. And he did it a lot! Of course, afterward, he would sometimes stare at the guy and say, "Who the hell told you that bullshit?"

He had his limitations.

he had not gone to a single seder this week, for which he was glad. It seemed a bad time to attend a ceremony that gave thanks in any way for the slaughter of Middle-Eastern boys. He had done that last year. He headed instead to the nearest bar, a dank, noisy dive called Sparky's, where he had often gone just after Marilyn left him. When he was married he never drank, but after the divorce he used to come in even in the mornings for beer, toast, and fried side meat. All his tin-pot miseries and chickenshit joys would lead him once again to Sparky's. Those half-dozen times that he had run into Marilyn at a store — this small town! — he had felt like a dog seeing its owner. Here was the person he knew best in life, squeezing an avocado and acting like she didn't see him. Oh, here I am, oh, here I am! But in Sparky's he knew he was safe from such unexpected encounters. He could sit alone and moan to Sparky. Some people consulted Marcus Aurelius for philosophy about the pain of existence. Ira consulted Sparky. Sparky himself didn't actually have that much to say about the pain of existence. He mostly leaned across the bar, drying a smudgy glass with a dingy towel, and said, "Choose life!" then guffawed.

"Bourbon straight up," Ira said, selecting the barstool closest to the TV, from which it would be hardest to watch the war news. Or so he hoped. He let the sharp, buttery elixir of the bourbon warm his mouth, then swallowed its neat, sweet heat. He did this over and over, ordering drink after drink, until he was lit to the gills. At which point he looked up and saw that there were other people gathered at the bar, each alone on a chrome-and-vinyl stool, doing the same. "Happy Easter," Ira said to them, lifting his glass with his left hand, the one with the wedding ring still jammed on. "The dead are risen! The damages will be mitigated! The Messiah is back among us squeezing the flesh — that nap went by quickly, eh? May all the dead arise! No one has really been killed at all — O.K., God looked away for a second to watch some I Love Lucy re-runs, but he is back now. Nothing has been lost. All is restored. He watching over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps!"

"Somebody slap that guy," said the man in the blue shirt down at the end.