The Feast of Love

TEN

“LISTEN, UH, what did you say your name was?” Diana asks.

“Charlie.”

“Listen, Charlie. I mean, I suppose this is all very interesting and everything, but it gives me the willies. First of all my story is not a story. Second of all, it’s not yours. It’s mine, isn’t it? I thought my life was mine and not yours. Third of all, I… I just lost my train of thought. Oh, I know: it’s all private. My life is not in the public domain. All right? Please don’t write about me.”

“Oh, I won’t. Not exactly. But I’ll invent a replica of you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t really have time to argue. I’m a busy woman. I’m an osteopath, you know.”

“Oh, that’s fascinating,” I say without irony, because I mean it. “An osteopath? What do osteopaths do? Do you mind my asking? I’ve always been confused about osteopaths.”

“No, sorry, I don’t have time to explain. You can look it up.”

“Okay. Maybe I’ll make you into a lawyer.”

“A lawyer? How can you do that? Incidentally, what did you say this project of yours is called?”

“The Feast of Love.”

“Ah-huh. Just like Bradley’s painting. I got that, didn’t I?”

“Yes. Just like Bradley’s painting.”

“It’s the best thing he ever did,” she says.

“There you go,” I tell her. “See, you have opinions to contribute, too.”

“That wasn’t an opinion,” she says. “I didn’t say anything. And I’m not going to say anything, believe me.”

“Okay,” I tell her. “But you’ll wish you had talked to me.”

“What does that mean?” she asks. “Are you threatening me? I should give you a piece of advice. As a favor. Free. Here it is. Don’t threaten me.” Her voice somehow manages to rise and to stay calm simultaneously. “Don’t threaten people, especially lawyers. Don’t threaten your own characters. It’s for your own good. You’ll wind up in a mess of litigation and … subplots.” She pauses. Then she seems to laugh. At least I think it’s a laugh. “You’re probably an intelligent man. Let’s not beat this shit to death. You get the point.”

ELEVEN

THE POINT WAS, I didn’t need a lover. I already had one of those, a married man who sometimes came over and who brought bunches of beautiful cut flowers, or soup he had made at home the night before.

He’d sneak the soup, carrot-leek being my favorite, out of his house in Tupperware containers, pretending he would serve it to himself for lunch. How he snuck the containers back was not my concern. He favored white shirts with French cuffs, lightly starched, though he sometimes wore a leather jacket and sunglasses to my place for his beauty’s sake. The last time he tried that I said, “You look like one of the Village People, sweetie,” kidding him, and he never wore those clothes again. As a back-door man he was devoted to me, and reliable. He wasn’t a lawyer, thank God. He worked for a pharmaceutical company, and his hours were flexible. I wasn’t in love with him so far as I could tell, but I liked him, sometimes to bursting, and I enjoyed talking to him, going to bed with him, and cooking meals with him, anything you could do inside four walls and away from public view.

He was athletic and fierce, funny when he wanted to be, and affectionate. As a lover, he was so companionable and enthusiastic, and he was clean as a knife. He had a thick head of hair, absolutely gorgeous features, and kiss-curls at the neck. I only saw him sweat hard when we were physically locked together, and his sweat had no odor, none, though his body did, a wonderful breadlike smell. We could have sex all day. He could make me come over and over again, but he didn’t bring me to a boil. How can I put this accurately? As follows: I didn’t have to sit up any further than normal for him and take more than the usual notice. Maybe I should have.

The only trouble with having an affair like ours is that the two of you can’t go outside much. It tests the friendship more than it tests the sex. The old story: you can’t be viewed in public, you’re always Anna and Vronsky on this diminished suburban scale. You can’t work in the garden, the two of you. You can’t rake the leaves. You can’t go to movies at the cineplex and you can’t find yourselves at concerts or gallery shows. You have no opportunity to sit around on Sunday morning, funky and grungy and full of opinions, while you read the paper. You just stay in little rooms, those times when you can arrange it, the illicit playground of furtive and therefore heightened eros. The constraints challenge your sexual resourcefulness. Sometimes you have sex inventively all afternoon, in bed or on the floor or in the shower, for want of anything better to do. You do the fireworks. You light them and watch them go off. Of course, he didn’t mind that, but, like me, he saw its limitations.

WE HAD ONCE TRIED to do what married people do: we went together to a department store to buy a pair of driving gloves. The whole event felt uncomfortably like a charade. At the counter, the salesgirl allowed me to try on several different pairs, and David smiled and frowned and exercised his discriminations and helped me choose the ones I bought, a very soft leather, light tan.

“Is that pair the one you really want, Diana?”

“Yes.” I smiled.

“Sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

He wasn’t the least bit businesslike when he was strolling the aisles with me; he was pleasant when he admired the sweaters and the watches and the diamond pins, and me, but the whole episode was like an amateur theatrical: Two Lovers Pretend They’re Not Clandestine. But we were, even there, under the lights and surveillance cameras. Our eyes kept roving, on the lookout for anyone known to the two of us, including the wife.

She, the wife, hadn’t managed to stay interested in him, he said, though they did make love somehow for the sake of appearances, and she put the radio on to a twenty-four-hour news station so that she wouldn’t have to hear the sounds they made together, the creaks and the groans. He liked going to bed in my bed because he didn’t have to listen to the news when I was on top and was riding him to kingdom come. Well, I mean: the poor man.

Despite all this, he said he loved his wife, et cetera. And of course there were the children, two of them, a boy and a boy. I’d say: You don’t have to explain or apologize, honey; I don’t want to marry you. I don’t love you. But, oh, sweet guy, you’re my friend, my buddy, and you’re agreeable and adept in bed. He seemed wounded when I complimented him for these secondary virtues. And I said, No, no. A sane man who can be a friend and a lover to a woman is a find. You, David, are a find, I would say as we lay facing each other in my bathtub’s hot soapy water and he slipped soap-rings over my fingers and then massaged my feet. You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I’m a malcontent and you can’t change that.

SO THERE I WAS, in Jitters at the Briardale Mall, drinking my morning coffee and reading the paper during a power failure. Housed in my gray suit, nicely and distinctly accessorized with a small gold pin David had bought for me, I was sipping a Tip of the Andes specialty blend and checking the New York Times arts-and-leisure section, a feature on the choreographer Mark Morris whose work I happened to admire for its ritualized symmetries. In college I had aspirations to be a dancer, now done for. But I felt relaxed and very expensive, concentrating my forces. I had a large complicated case in the works and I was Zen-ing the whole thing, coolly distant but already imagining through strategy each step and each minute detail how I’d win. I was pre-victoring it. I had a couple of aces up my sleeve, and the anticipation of my winning — my future winnings — made me not happy, exactly, but contented with myself. The client was almost irrelevant by that time.

When the power went off in the mall, I was the power, so I didn’t care. I thought about my four colleagues in their darkened law offices half a mile away. I imagined those contentious characters — nominally friends of mine — stuck in elevators or in conference rooms with no ventilation, trying to figure out who to blame for the loss of electricity.

If God appeared on this earth again, lawyers would sue Him.

I always have coffee before going to work. I tend to get to the office a bit late. I am quite successful — I do litigation — and can pretty much set my own hours except when I go to court. I have to be reckoned with. No one tells me when to arrive at the office. No can do. You don’t dictate anything to me.

My days are segmented, very clearly divided and defined, and that is how I work it. I have a compartment for everything, including getting ready for the working day, down to the coffee and the paper and the arts-and-leisure section. And I have always orchestrated my romances with, well, an icy methodical self-interest. That’s how I managed my affair with David.

As regulated by law, as soon as the power went off, the safety floodlights went on. Certainly enough illumination to catch up on the news. Sounds of meteorological strife resounded above me. From the sound of it, hail was falling out of the sky. I didn’t care. I went on reading.

The manager of the shop appeared next to me.

“How can you read in this light? It’s so dim.”

I didn’t bother looking up. “I’m used to dim bulbs,” I said.

“In that case, you’d be right at home here.”

Oh, a contender. Someone for whom some notice was required. It’s always a key moment when you have to drop what you’re doing to look up at a man who has initiated this sort of conversation. So, noting the paragraph where I had stopped reading in the Mark Morris article, I trained my blue eyes on him and took his measure. Before me, leaning against a chair, stood a tallish man of somewhat uncertain appearance. He gave me a guarded smile. He didn’t flinch when I gazed at him. He radiated a sort of old-fashioned semisexy kindliness planted in the midst of a serviceable face. He had meditative, haunted eyes, a painter’s eyes, as it turned out, widely set apart in his vaguely half-handsome head. I couldn’t yet tell if he was being friendly in order to flirt, or to increase customer satisfaction. Or whether the flirting was specific to me or generic to women. I kept thinking: he’s halfway there, wherever “there” is. Probably the kids in grade school had called him Froggy.

He stood, as if planted, in the cold trashy evacuation floodlight and smiled persistently. He didn’t seem dim in the least. It was all a pretense. He was imagining us as comrades in a weather crisis, elbow to elbow as we faced a green sky. Meteorological solidarity. I heard the hail pounding atop the skylight. Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects, I thought. “I’ve seen you here before,” he said.

“This place is close to work,” I said.

“I thought maybe the appeal lay in our atmosphere.” He leaned against the wall. “Our way of making our customers feel at home. Not customers — guests.”

“It’s close to work.”

“Or that maybe you were attracted by the paintings, the ambiance, all this comfortable furniture you see, or perhaps even the quality of the coffee.”

“It’s close to work.”

“Okay,” he said, “it’s the staff, the friendly unassuming service people you tend to encounter periodically around here, like Chloé, snoozing there in the back.” He gestured in the direction of a punkette half-asleep in a rear booth. I was about to get up and flee from his defective overtures when he said, “I’m sorry. You’re exasperated by me, I can tell. You know, I don’t mean to be exasperating. I’ll let you finish your coffee. Sorry to bother you.” He waited. “By the way, where is work, for you?”

“A mile or so away.” I pointed a finger westward. “You’re not particularly exasperating, you know. Not specifically. I’ve known worse.”

“Thank you. What do you do? For a living?”

I told him.

“Ah.” Sudden thunder crashed outside. We both moved, though I think I must have shuddered and surprised myself, because he told me a month later that I had shuddered and he had noticed and recorded it. That little movement, that tremor of mine, struck a flame. Bradley is interested in fears and phobias. He gestured toward the center of the mall, where there was nothing at all to see. “Violent weather,” he said.

“Right.”

“Well, you know… an improvement.”

“Ah.” I decided to nod, but not emphatically. An improvement to what? I would not inquire. A nod without enthusiasm, a nod that withheld final agreement, was what I gave him. I realize that my irony and my distance can become fatiguing, tiresome. But evasiveness is deeply erotic, at least to me. I can fight my own chilliness when the situation demands, when I rouse myself to charm and warmth. He smiled at me as if facing a strong headwind, which I had created and which collaborated with the storm outside. “You like it?”

“What?”

“The… the violent weather.”

“Oh,” he said, “sure.” He was very agreeable.

“So do I, I suppose.” I was trying to make a bit of a social effort. “When I was a little girl, I was afraid of thunder.” I glanced down at my newspaper. Something by Paul Hindemith was being revived at Lincoln Center. And something else by what’s-his-name, the boy genius, Korngold. What had happened to the Mark Morris article? “I was quite a cliché in those days,” I said, remembering the conversation.

“But you’re not a cliché anymore, probably. What are you afraid of now?” he asked.

“Now?” I thought for a moment. “You’re very direct. Why do you ask?”

“Because you don’t look like you’re afraid of much. You don’t look like the afraid type.”

“The afraid type? Exactly right. I’m not. Well, since you ask, I am opposed, emotionally I guess, to open spaces,” I said. “They get to me sometimes. Fields. They make me slightly loopy. Any place without a boundary. I have mild agoraphobia. Also I’m terrified of being bored. I get bored, and then I get scared of the way I’m bored. Nothing I can’t handle, though.”

“My ex,” he said, “was afraid of dogs.”

A pause. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. The thunder and wind outside made a theatrical sound-effects din, but externally, distantly, an irrelevance to people in a shopping mall, except those who wanted electric light and couldn’t have it. “You know,” he said, pressing his luck, “sometimes, when I’m working here, I look out into the … recesses of this place, and I see all these people walking by, and I think about what they like and what they’re afraid of, and what makes them feel desolate.” Desolate. I’d never heard anyone use that word in conversation. What would be next? Disheartened? Forlorn? What a strange counterproductive and counterintuitive way to flirt! The style beyond a style. He kept on smiling, despite the turn in the conversation and despite his ineptitude at this sort of talk.

I still didn’t know his name. Shopping specters slid past us on their way somewhere. Winds belted the mall, whipped it.

It felt and looked weirdly sweet, that smile of his, and then I took the time and the initiative to glance at his hands. He had nice hands. There was a physical intelligence there. He didn’t have — he would never have — the visible attractiveness that David had, the sexual power to make you painfully aware of his body’s presence in the room with yours without your even having to look at him, and he would never have David’s shoulders and his way with words, but David was beautiful and wrongful and already spoken for. He was as assuming as this guy was unassuming.

“And then I think” — he was still talking while I considered what he, this guy, might be like in bed, long-term, or on the sofa on Sunday morning, married, as it were, as the sun poured in the windows, how he would be behind the wheel or raking the leaves — “about how even that — what people are afraid of — can make them attractive. And after I’ve been through their… fears, I start to imagine, not that I have all that much time, how I’d get along with them, if we were ever a couple, you know, where we’d travel to and so forth, Bali or Fuji maybe or the Orkney Isles, and how —”

“You mean Fiji.”

“What?”

“You said ‘Fuji’ and you meant ‘Fiji.’ One’s a film. The other’s an island in… well, you know where it is.”

“Oh,” he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn’t a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down.

“ — Here,” I said, interrupting his silence. I took a business card out of my purse.

“What?”

“I’m writing down my home phone number. My name is Diana.”

He took the card and stared a bit dumbly at the number on it. “Thank you,” he said at last, as if he’d found an eyedropper of eloquence and was determined to use it.

“And now,” I said, “as decreed by custom, you tell me your name.”

“Well I’m Bradley,” he said in a rush, as if the kids in elementary school had always made fun of that name, and it was a wound for him. “Bradley Smith. Could I ask you to do something?”

“What’s that?”

“Could you stand up, so that I could give you a hug?”

Well, that was cute. But I’d rather have a tracheotomy than hug a man the first time through. “No,” I said, “no, indeed, I certainly won’t do that. Not yet. Nope. Too soon for hugs between strangers. Actually, I will stand up, but if there are going to be hugs, Bradley, they’ll have to come a bit later. That’s one of the things you’ll learn about me. You’ll excuse me, but I have to get to the office now, power failure or not. Time’s a-wasting.”

I shouldn’t have said that, that minute condescension in tone, but I’m not sure he noticed. So I rose to my feet, and he watched me do it. He appraised me. Oh, the poor guy: I bet he knew he was overmatched already. I think he knew I would always be quicker, and not just verbally, my edges would be sharper than his, more acute angles, I was the superior animal and he was in for the time of his life. I’m good-looking, but I will come at you. I’m one of those women who can’t see the beauty in any kind of weakness or pathos. Most men won’t trade up from themselves, they’ll walk away from a matchup like this, even if the woman is scarily beautiful, which I’m not, though almost, if you like intelligent eyes and gestures that correct themselves halfway through. But I saw him pocket my phone number and keep his fingers on the card, that little brand-new fetish curled up safely in its nest. He must have been a brave soul, in his way.

Then he went behind the counter and came back and gave me a slip of paper. It was an expertly drawn sketch of a dragon erasing, with his nose, the sign in front of Jitters. I was sitting inside the door, in his drawing, reading. Just a few strokes of the pencil, and you could tell it was me, just from my posture. I put it in my pocket. It had been signed by Bradley. An original.

WHAT WAS IN IT FOR ME? A relationship with Bradley Smith? Was this the classic instance of a smart woman selling herself short? As the weeks went on and I grew to know him better, I thought of all these default-mode negatives: he seemed not ignoble, not ill-spoken, not a bully, not inconsiderate, not obnoxious, not a boor, not violent, not distressing, not disdainful, not a bad dresser, not unmindful, not dirty or smelly, and not particularly ironic. He was not unhandsome. He was not unattractive.

In other words, he was husband material. Simple as that.

I didn’t need a husband, I’ve said that. But I hadn’t had one, not yet, though there had been half-hearted offers, and I was ready to have the experience, retro as it may have been, of being married, to say nothing of the fact that it seemed about time for one of them, one of these unattached default-mode fellows to wander into my life and choose me. God, I sound awful. Also, I wanted a baby sooner or later, and I didn’t want to do the baby thing without having a husband. I didn’t want the weird political progressivism and the faint pathos of the single mom label hanging over me. Myself, I wanted to do the whole scene in the old-fashioned way.

As my mother once said to me, They’re quite crazy, dear — men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

I WATCHED HIM PAINT his canvases in his basement. We went canoeing on the Huron River. I played with his companion, Bradley the dog (a special-needs dog, I am sorry to say, cognitively challenged, and a slobberer). We took some weekend trips to Chicago and listened to jazz. He drew a picture of the Dragon with the Rubber Nose giving me a ride on its back. That picture actually made my heart do a back flip. How could he possibly know that I had wanted to ride dragons from the time I was a girl? We had candlelit dinners at his house. We had sex, successful sex, good-enough sex, though when I compared him to David in that category, which I could not help doing, he lost. It seems a shame to say so, but one orgasm is not as good as another. So what, I thought. We sat around on Sunday morning, funky and grungy, and traded opinions. We went to galleries, where he expounded his views on the art we saw (he rarely liked it and denounced and demeaned it in whispers to me). He showed me his copies of ARTnews. I met his neighbors, the Ginsbergs. We went up to Five Oaks and met his sister and brother-in-law, the barber. We worked in the yard, we went to my health club. There was a peacefulness to it. I would talk about the law, and he would zone out a bit as he pretended to listen. I scared him and, humbly, he tried to cover it up. I gradually settled down into him the way you settle down into an easy chair. I accepted, conditionally, the kindheartedness he offered me, though I thought it a bit dull, the way a comfortable familiar thing is dull, and its dullness is totally beside the point.

I found myself, at odd moments, leaning over him and kissing his bald spot, the one toward the back of his head. I met his parents. He met mine. He was always nervous around me, afraid that he would say something that would unmask him as a fool or a dolt. Poor guy, he was unmasked right from the start. If I loved anything about him, it was his plainness, his lack of mask, his failure of costume. This is the sort of man he was: he made balloon sculpture every two weeks or so to amuse the neighborhood kids who lived up the block and sometimes wandered into his yard. He criticized himself for not being better at it. What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight. He was uninteresting and genuine, sweet-tempered and dependable, the sort of man who will stabilize your pulse rather than make it race.

He proposed. And I accepted.

THE NEXT TIME DAVID came over — because peacefulness is insufficient — he brought wild rice chicken soup, along with a perfectly chilled wine he liked, a sauvignon blanc. No leather jacket this time — he’d come from the office.

Somehow he’d gotten a streak of ink from a ballpoint pen on his face, the right side. (He’s clean-shaven.) Once he was inside the door, but just barely inside, I curled my leg around his and licked my finger with spit and slowly and pleasurably wiped the ink off.

As I did that, we talked about our usual news, but somehow I didn’t get around, at least not right away, to telling him about Bradley’s proposal and my acceptance of it. After the soup and the wine, we went into my bedroom where he kissed me and undressed me, unsnapping my skirt smartly and kneeling before me, slowly lowering my underwear. He liked to get on his knees before me while I was still standing, doing homage to me. He would put his arms around me, kissing me, and then he would hold his face against my abdomen, and I would feel the nubs of his beard, and I would sigh with pleasure. He made me, I have to admit it, weak in the knees. After that, I took off his clothes. I noticed his body a bit more this time, caring for it, appreciating its musculature. I saw his reflection in the dresser’s mirror, on whose side I had lodged Bradley’s drawing of me riding the dragon.

David and I made love at some length. While we were engaged in this activity, I continued to study him, between gasps, the way you’d study a habit you’re about to give up. This man, this particular one: all his adult physical features, all of them manfully occupied, not one of them boyish. Boyishness was not his style. We bucked and buckled and fought and ground ourselves into each other. First we made love — the quiet tenderness of it — and then we fucked brutally and mindlessly and then we went back to making love and then that lapsed into fucking again. He brought out a thing, a beast in me I hadn’t known I had, and it always surprised me to see it, to see her as me. For the first time in my life it occurred to me that a guy who is really, really good at making love to a woman, the same woman, and who is inventively and exceptionally good at it time after time, who is carefully brutal at some moments and solicitous at others, who knows her sweet spots and concentrates on them and seems to be worshipping her body and is keen on driving her to a sweet distraction every time, is not someone to be ignored or otherwise taken for granted or dismissed on minor charges, even as a lover, a recreational human.

When we were done, I inhaled and smelled the rank and honeyed odor of our brute sexual heat, which, that evening, made me feel nostalgic for us, for the two of us. I cut it off, that nostalgia, but it kept seeping back.

After a rest, I was kissing him on his flat gorgeous stomach, seasoned with small hairs, letting my own hair tickle him, and moving downward toward where the smell was strongest. It was then that I looked up at him and said, “You know what, David? Bradley proposed.”

He nodded. He knew all about Bradley. Apparently he had never taken him seriously. He had his fingers in my hair, my aggressive attitudinizing hair. He frowned. “Your artist? What did you say to him, Diana?” He waited as if he were actually curious. “What did you say in response? To his question?”

“I said yes.”

There was a long silence after that, during which he kept his fingers in my hair, stroking my scalp. I was still kissing him, more as a delay to the next stage of whatever we would do or say to each other.

“You did, eh? Well.” He leaned his head back. He was quiet. Sounds of the crickets came into the room, and the music from the CD player, Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” and the occasional car passing by on the street. “That’s interesting. So you said yes.” Then he said, a bit more querulously now, his face disagreeably restive, “Well, Diana. You agreed to marry him?” He was alert. He was quickening. “You actually did that?”

“Yup. That’s right,” I said.

“You are going to marry him. No kidding. Jesus, you’re mean. You’re doing this as a little prank. This is the joker side of you. But you know, you’re going to wither him right away. Honey, you are going to eat him alive. You do that to the nice ones, and I know that because you have a past and you have me, and I’ve seen you in action. I know you. Don’t say I don’t, kiddo, I know every square inch of you. He won’t stand up to you for longer than a year, you and your sharp edges. He’s not your match. You’ve described him to me, here in this very bed. You’re such a bruiser, Diana, what the hell are you thinking?”

“Oh, I’m not that mean —”

“Yes you are.”

“Not to him, I’m not. Besides, you don’t know him. He makes me into a nice person, sometimes. You don’t know what he can and can’t do. I’m different with him than I am with you. You know, now that you mention it, maybe I should apologize.”

“To whom? To me? For being in bed with me?” he asked. “You’re being vague. That’s not like you. It’s not me you should apologize to.”

“No, no, that’s not what I’m getting at. You’re missing my point. Deliberately. Well, Bradley…” Somehow I couldn’t finish the thought. I couldn’t remember whom I thought I should apologize to. He had confused me for a minute. That wasn’t like me. My mind felt bleary.

Right about then the phone rang. He told me not to answer it, but I did, leaning over him so that my breasts brushed against his legs. It was a solicitation call, one for window treatments. I hung up briskly and looked over at David.

“What about Bradley?” he asked me, as if we hadn’t been interrupted. “Speaking of whom, why are you here with me?” His eyes, I thought, were quite bright with something like curiosity. “Let me get this straight. If you’re planning on getting married to this Bradley, this coffee guy, this sketch-pad fellow, what exactly are you doing here in bed with me? And how come you didn’t tell me until now? You’re supposed to be fat with your new love. You should be thick with it.” He scratched his shoulder and frowned squarely at me. “You should be strutting around arm in arm with him. You should be nestled with him, listening to those Mingus albums of yours. Instead, here you are, and you’re in bed with me. I thought this marriage idea of yours was a goof. You always said it was a goof.”

“A goof? No, I never said that. I’m sure I never said that. I wouldn’t use that word. I don’t know. As for us, you and me, we’re having sex. What do you mean, what am I doing here with you? I’m doing what we always do together. We talk and make love, and make love and talk.”

“Well, if you’re going to marry him…”

“I am going to marry him.”

“Then you shouldn’t be curled up naked with me like this, should you? Correct me if I’m wrong. You should be out there, wherever ‘out there’ is, with Bradley, this fiancé of yours, and being with him.” He waited for a moment. “Exclusively.”

“ ‘Exclusively’? Oh, come on. Don’t be priggish about this,” I said, collecting myself. “Exclusively. What a word. I don’t see why. Why I shouldn’t be here, I mean. You’re married, after all. You’re the married one. The guilty party.” I pointed at his finger. “When we’re both naked, just the two of us, you’re still dressed in your wedding ring. I’m not even married yet. I’m just that plain old traditional figure, the other woman. The mistress.” I had his cock in my hand. I was determined to keep this light, comic, social, and not insane, and I started to suck him playfully, but he wouldn’t let me go any further, shaking me off, and he sat up.

“Stop that. We need to talk. That’s different,” he said. “My being married.”

“No, it isn’t,” I told him. “It’s exactly the same. You can’t criticize me.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re going in, a first-timer to marriage, lecturing me on ethics while you go down on me. You’re betraying him before you’ve even been faithful to him. What kind of scene can you call that? You haven’t even tried to be faithful. There was a time when I was faithful to Katrinka. You’re so restless, Diana, you haven’t even given your own marriage a chance. You’re pre-bored, for Chrissake. You’re like a monster who wants me to play with all your toys, out of sheer boredom.”

“You’re jealous, David. That’s sweet.”

“No I’m not. I’m taken aback, is what I am. I’m really taken aback.”

“ ‘Really taken aback.’ Listen to yourself. Look at the words you’re using. You’re not one to give me lectures on faithfulness, buddy boy. Is this some sort of guy solidarity thing?”

“Well,” David said. “Well.” He gathered himself, sat up in my bed, and stared at me. I looked away. “Hey, Diana,” he said, “look at me.” I did. No problem there. “You’re a pretty strong woman, you know that? And you’re beautiful. But the trouble is, you’re a thug. What do you think you’re doing here, doing this lonesome-girl thing in bed with me? Are you just playing with this guy? Do you love him? This Bradley person? Do you love this guy you’re going to marry?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Sure it is. It’s always that simple. So. Do you love him?”

“He’s lovable, David. That’s what counts.”

“No. That’s not what I asked. Lovable is different. Do you love him?”

“What a question. I don’t know,” I said. “Sort of.” I grinned and shrugged.

He wound back and slapped me, hard.

I got out of bed, right then, right away. I stood naked next to the window. On the bedside table the little votive candles that we always light for lovemaking were blown out by the breeze of my passing. “You bastard. Get the fuck out of my house,” I said.

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” he said, a calm and sexy insolent look on his face. “Nope, I think I’ll stay here for a little while.” He snaked down under the sheet. “I’d like some coffee, if you please, Diana.” He thought for a moment. “Decaf.” He then gave me a strange look, one I can’t describe, as if he’d been gratified by hitting me.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” I said. “Don’t you hit me ever, you bastard.” I said this calmly.

“You’re marrying a man you’re not sure you love?” he asked from where he lay, scary and calm. “That’s what you’re doing? You cunt, you deserve to be slapped.”

“Don’t you ever call me that.”

“What?”

“That word. I hate that word.”

“Yeah, I agree. It’s an ugly word. But, you know, somebody should knock some sense into you. Honey pie, I should beat the living shit out of you.” At once he was on his feet, putting on his boxer shorts. Standing there, he cut a figure (David’s vice is his physical vanity), and I couldn’t help it, I watched him. He has nice legs, powerful thighs, every inch of which I had kissed and put my tongue upon, and I didn’t care anymore. “I’ve never hit a woman before in my life. Now I see the logic in it, if it’s you,” he said. His voice was heading toward a shout and soon would arrive there. “I would save you a ton of grief if I beat the living crap out of you, so you didn’t marry someone you didn’t love.” His eyes were glistening and bright with rage. “Goddamn you.” He was pacing. “You’ve just hired him as an entertainment. This is beneath you. Excuse me while I do the dishes. I have to calm down.”

He went into the kitchen. When I heard the sound of running water, I sat on the bed and I cradled my face in my hands for a few minutes. My cheek was burning where David had struck me. I made small wrinkles in the bedsheets with my toes. I was trying to think but seemed to be out of basic cognitive resources. That was new for me. I’m good at the complexities of argumentation. Somehow I hadn’t — I don’t know why — expected him to react the way he had. At last I stood up and put on a nightgown and went into the kitchen.

David was standing there in his boxer shorts, washing the soup bowls and rinsing them, washing the wineglasses and rinsing them, all with his usual care and thoughtfulness. I looked at the curve of his spine as it plunged into his shorts. I thought of how I would miss his body, the soups, the wine, the talk — the whole of this beautiful fucked-up man. I would miss the commotion we made together. That more than anything. Making love to him was like going through a car wash, except you came out dirtier and more alive at the other end.

“You made that coffee yet?” he asked.

“Not yet. I thought you could brew it yourself.”

“Why don’t you do that right now? And go to hell, if it’s no trouble, while you’re at it.”

“This coarse language isn’t like you, David.”

He turned around and gave me the display: he held his arms out operatically, and I was still so in love with him at that moment, I realized, so fevered, and I hated that. “Don’t get fastidious with me. What am I like, Diana? What am I like? What do I do? Go ahead. Tell me, if you’re so sure, if you’re the expert on me. What am I, besides your friend, and the man who makes love to you when we can both arrange it? Diana, I’m the guy who looks out for you. Who else does that?” He was getting angry all over again. He was re-angering himself. “Who else really does that for you? Nobody. I think I’ll go outside, right this minute if you don’t mind. If I don’t, I’ll make a mess of you, I’ll give you a shiner. And then what will the neighbors think? Why don’t you make that coffee for me, while I’m outside?”

“You’re not dressed.”

“I have my shorts on. Besides, do you think I give a flying fuck about the neighbors?”

He crossed the kitchen, past the vase where his cut flowers — gladioli this time — were arranged on the breakfast table, there in the alcove, and then he stomped out toward the back entryway. As quickly as I could, I put on a bathrobe and ran out to see where he’d gone. I couldn’t see him. In the living room, the CD player, rotating its carousel selections, had gotten around to the Miles Davis we had carefully timed for background to postcoital murmuring, Sketches of Spain. But no David in sight.

I put my face to the window and tried to see him. Oddly, for a moment Bradley’s word desolation returned to me as I raised my hand to the side of my face and stared out into the darkness. Night birds and crickets chirped away madly.

The house I own is a large one, and I have an ample front yard with azaleas planted on the north side, and when I put my hands to the sides of my head to blank out the light, I could see him squatting in the back under a tree, in his underwear, pulling out random clumps of grass with his right hand as he swigged at a beer, which he must have found somewhere in the refrigerator. He was talking to himself, a novelty David-thing, absolutely new and unseen before by me, though I couldn’t be absolutely sure what he was doing in that dim light aside from being actively upset with me. The face, though, was the classic male crying face even if there happened to be no tears on it. The son of a bitch loved me, and he had never told me about it. He was so rigorous.

He dropped the beer can and the grass he had pulled out and started to walk toward the garage. When he came around to the front again, he was buck naked. In his grief he had taken off his boxer shorts. God knows what he did with them. Thrown them up into a tree, maybe. He was in a state of erotic semicomic despair. At last he had well and truly surprised me. I was dumbstruck, and I was thinking of the nearest phone, but all David did was to come inside and return to the bedroom and slowly and almost shyly put on his beautifully tailored clothes, item by item, carefully, though of course without the boxer shorts. I wondered what he would tell his wife about their absence, but maybe she would be asleep when he came in, oblivious in her dreams. Maybe she never noticed what he wore. He attached his cuff links: David. If he lost his composure quickly and violently, he recovered it just as quickly. There’s that particular man for you.

I had followed him into the room. My face stung. “David,” I said. “This doesn’t mean —”

“ — You shouldn’t marry someone you don’t love,” he said, his back to me. “Oh sweetie, it’s a soul-error.” He waited. He stared at the dragon drawing on my dresser mirror. “Yeah, and see if I’m right. Hey, where’s that famous coffee of yours? The cup I asked for? Again and again and again? You never made it, did you? You couldn’t bring yourself to do that, could you, for my sake? That little thing. Well, too late now.”

And those were the last words I heard from him until after Bradley and I were married, when David and I started up our relationship once more. I was the one who called him. I was the initiator. Then he called me. Before too long, we were back to where we were before, slamming each other around. By anyone’s standards, I suppose, I’m bad and ill-tempered, but David matches me in that and it’s why we were so compatible. We go about our hypocrisy with aplomb. And we’re complacent, too, mostly about what we have and what we can get. He is my other. But, you know, these are the cards I was dealt, and that’s the way I played my hand, and I don’t much care what you think.

TWELVE

BECAUSE THE NEXT MORNING was a Saturday, and my Esther was sleeping at last, perhaps only for a few minutes, the tossing-and-turning kind of sleep, I rolled quietly off my side of the bed and took a shower. I took care not to drop the bar of soap. I shaved my face (my features are porcine, coarse, and bristly — I have a snout like a wild boar, and yet, I think, I am handsome), not looking into my own eyes, avoiding self-commentary on the bags underneath them. I cooked some oatmeal for myself and then fed the goldfish, Julius and Ethel.

I went into my study and pulled out the checkbook from the desk drawer. I am familiar with clutter, with the diffusion of philosophy into papers and bookmarks and the scatterings of thought. I wrote out a check to the order of my son Aaron Ginsberg (it was not for as much as he had asked). And then I realized: no no no, I cannot send the boy a check with my bank account number on it. He is wily, he and his strange dangerous friends. They will find a way of ordering the bank to send them all the money in my account. I do not know how they will do this, but they will know. These children of ours have befriended computers, and the terrible dangerous computers will help them help themselves.

So I therefore drove, this bright sunny morning, to the branch bank that kept its offices open on Saturday. By this time it was nine o’clock, by the official clocks. The sun shone its burning rays on the landscapes of my life, the real world that made Plato so unhappy. My bank teller’s name was Theresa. I seem to remember that she wore glasses. I was beyond having any certain opinions on her appearance, however, this girl, her beauty or lack of it. Perhaps she belonged to somebody, in the amorous way of things. Perhaps she gave off an odor of lilac. What was that to me? What, may I ask, was the odor of sachet of lilac from a bank teller to me that morning? We were in separate galaxies. We were lit by separate lights and we cast separate shadows. I was managing a catastrophe, and she was working as a clerk in a bank.

Theresa, I said when I reached her window, my throat dry, I need a cashier’s check made out to my son, Aaron Ginsberg. It must come from my savings. I handed the passbook and the withdrawal slip to her, and she checked my balance and quickly typed up the check on a machine. Thank you, I said. She must have smiled, such people do all the time, after all, but I must confess that it made no impression on me. I returned to my Ford car and drove home.

Back in my study I wrote a brief note to my son, asking for… asking for what? For his assurance that he would spend it wisely? We were beyond such tender father-son messages. (A maddening tune was going through my head, “Twentieth-Century Blues.”) I asked my son Aaron not to make good on his threat to end his life. On my desk was a picture of him, smiling into the white-cotton sunshine on a tennis court, on a singular day when he was healthy and happy.

I enclosed the check with this note. On the front of the envelope I attached a stamp — the American flag. Well, I don’t mean for these details to have an oppressive poignancy. I stamped the letter and wrote his name and address, a post office box number, on it. I walked to the corner and dropped it in the mailbox. In the dark it lay among the other fellow letters, whispering to one another their messages of love and longing and betrayal.

But almost as soon as I released the metallic lip of the box, I remembered that Aaron had instructed me to send the money by express mail, as a sign of his last-minute emergency condition, the bloodletting of his threatened mortality. What could I do? The letter had been thoughtlessly mailed. Briefly I considered calling the airlines to get a ticket immediately out to Los Angeles, to intervene personally. But by now I knew that to him I was worse in person and therefore more ineffective as a father than I was when reduced microscopically to a mere voice over the phone. In person, revulsion at the mere sight of my paternal features would settle over his face instantly, before I had committed the first father crime of the day.

Inside the house, Esther slept on restlessly, poor old girl.

ENWOMBED WITHIN MY FORD CAR, not knowing where to go but recognizing for my own good that I should not go anywhere near the Amalgamated Education Corporation, I drove to my neighbor’s coffee shop in the mall. Bradley was not there in person. Instead, I found in front of me a young American girl whose tee-shirt was labeled RAGING HORMONES and who asked me for my order.

Coffee, young lady, please.

Any kind?

Any kind is fine.

Blend-of-the-day?

Fine, fine.

Comin’ right up.

Excuse me, I asked, but where is the manager? Where is Bradley?

In back somewheres, she said. Ordering stock. You know him?

He is my neighbor, I informed her. In fact he lives next door.

Wow. You’re Mr. S’s neighbor. No kidding. Hey, you want a Kleenex? she asked. Here. She held one out to me.

For what purpose?

You look like you need it, she said. She pointed at my face. Like, tears or something?

I hadn’t realized, I said. Thank you. Thank you very much. After paying her, I took the coffee and the Kleenex and found my way to a chair near the back. I dabbed at my eyes. My eyes were damp but not yet completely overflowing. I was the only customer. In desperation I glanced around for something to read. The newspapers, however, were in the front.

She came toward the back to clear the tables near mine.

So, she said, whattya do?

I teach philosophy, I said.

Oh jeez. I could use a philosopher, she said, like right this week. Right now. This minute. She stopped and put her hand on her hip. Like, I’m about to do something? Maybe you don’t mind my asking. And this thing I’m about to do, it’s bad? But it’s going to result in something good? So, in your opinion, should I do it?

What’s your name, young lady? I asked.

Chloé. Clow-ay.

Not Clow-ee?

Naw. I customized it. Everybody should customize their names.

The answer is no, Chloé. The ends never justify the means. Almost every ethical philosophy of consequence will tell you so. Kant’s categorical… well, bad actions make the result turn out bad.

I thought that was what you’d say. Thanks. Uh, she said, do I owe you anything?

What?

Like money? For your opinion. Because it’s your job as a philosopher to give advice, right? And besides, you live next door to Mr. S. Since it’s your job to think, I should pay you. Anyway, do I owe you anything?

No, Chloé, you don’t. But thank you for offering. I bowed my head. In silence, she went away. I drank my coffee. Never once had Aaron as an adult child asked me for advice. To my best recollection, never as an adult had he ever asked me so much as a single question.

Bradley returned. He stopped by my chair. He sat to make neighborly conversation. He asked me how I was. And I told him, the genial man, I told him everything, because I hardly knew him, and because Chloé was taking care of his customers, and because he had hung up The Feast of Love in the back, and because he was so vacant as a human being — I do not mean this as criticism — that I could fill him, that morning, with my difficulties, and not cause a flood condition. Toward the end, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was a consolation of sorts.

And how are you, Bradley? I asked.

I’m in love, he said. It’s recent. I’ve met this wonderful woman.

And who is the lucky lady?

Her name’s Diana, he said. We’re going to be married, I think.

Well, you must bring her over to meet Esther and me.

And with that, I rose to leave.

THIRTEEN

I CAN BE SO UNMOTIVATED. For example. You know the dust that can, like, float in the air? Me, I was totally capable of sitting in a chair for hours, watching the dust-fuzz hanging in front of me. If there was sunlight in the room, just the particles of visible molecules or whatever, I was excellent and enthralled.

I’m not saying that I’m deep, I’m just saying I watch the dust, and I’m not stoned either, when I do it. Just observant. I’m concentrating on it, figuring out its mystery, its purpose for being here in the same universe with us.

When I tried to get Oscar to study the dust, he went: you’re so, like, Looney Tunes, Chloé. Jeez, dust. He was smiling when he said that, criticizing my dust interest. But you could tell that he didn’t get the profundity of dust at all. Poor guy. Well, some people can’t sing, either.

But what I’m saying is, I can get motivated when I have to. I can stop dust-meditating and get off my ass and get the job done. Which means that when I had to figure out the future, I took steps.

Oscar’s friends, these boy-men from his high school jock clique — Speedy and Ranger and Fats (who was not fat — where do guys get names like this?) — came by our apartment, grab-assing Oscar and demanding that he come out to play basketball, it being early summer, and the two of us, Oscar and me, not having to work at Jitters that day. Oscar! Hey, man, they said, first of all hollering up to our window, dude, you just gotta come shoot some hoop, dooooooode, Oscaaaaaaaar, we just gotta have another guy. Oscar hears the call of male needs, he barks his yes downward to them, so then he puts on his shorts and his Nikes and kisses me and gets his shoulders punched in the parking lot and his ass whapped and he is gone. Like poof, like a husband. Empty nest.

I had to figure out if Oscar and me had any prospects at all, as a couple, together. So there I was, me, Chloé, alone. But with the keys to Oscar’s ancient AMC Matador, and I sat there, and I’m like, I gotta find out the future from an expert. So I took some money and put it into my pockets and my shoes in case I got robbed, and I drove over to Ypsilanti, where the psychics are. You can’t do psychics off of TV. The TV psychics are mostly wrong, and way too expensive besides.

I had been reading my tarot cards on Oscar and wanted a second opinion. And I figured I’d need to take something of his, so I took a mungy sweat sock and his track team relay baton and one of his knives, which he had told me not to touch, but which I did touch, for his own good and mine too.

YOU GOTTA GO TO YPSILANTI to find out the future. Or Willow Run. See, what you do is, you leave the ho-hum middle-class environs of Ann Arbor and Pittsfield Township, and then you explore your way down the strip, past the used car lots and the Arby’s and the Dairy Queen, and then there’s Eastern Michigan University with its stiff-dick watertower (but there’s a brick condom on it — go see it for yourself if you think I’m kidding), and then downtown Ypsi, but then, when you get east of there, that’s when it turns really interesting and nasty over there in the Twilight Zone, that’s where the future-experts ply their trade.

I mean, most cities have got their own Twilight Zones, right? Where the old wrecked factories and warehouses live? ’Cause East Ypsi has got these ancient car assembly plants, these old humping kickass grounds of steel and scrapyards, and the scrapyards sort of find their way next to topless bars and tattoo parlors, and these freakazoidal video stores where you don’t want to know what or who they’re renting in there, and outside on the curb the underfed cats and dogs are staring at you and begging for puppy chow when you drive past, and then there’s razor wire around most of the warehouses, so you just know the karma’s really complicated there. It’s like the future has already happened, and it’s all past by now? Like that?

Anyway, you gotta drive over there on a sunny day. Otherwise it doesn’t work. You get bad head colds in your psyche if you go there on a cloudy day. Then your psyche sneezes your good karma out into the ozone layer, where, of course, it burns away.

And that’s how come I was driving the Matador in the sunshine past Odd Lots Supermart and a pawn shop and a gun shop and then a vacant patch of struggling grass, with a thing in the middle of it you couldn’t identify except it was metal, and no one had ever found out how to work it, and it was ultra-dead. Rust never sleeps, said the bard. I’m bummed. Where’s the professional psychic whose office I thought was here? I saw it once last time I found myself located in this locale. In this hyper-slum there were, like, shoes everywhere, shoes without anybody standing in them, old shoes. On the sidewalk here and there, brown leather shoes. Very Plan 9 from Outer Space. So how come people, such as men, leave their shoes out here? What’s going on with these shoes out on the pavement? My advice is: Guys, find a wastebasket.

And now I’m near Willow Run, where they made the big World War Two bombers back when life still had a purpose in this area and people knew what their work was good for, and I’m seeing more pawn shops with iron bars on the front, and bunched-up tallboy-beer-in-the-brown-bag guys standing but mostly sitting on the sidewalk doing their smiling openmouthed but no teeth chickenshit thing, har har har, hey man, there’s a girl in that big ol’ Matador, is that door on the driver’s side unlocked, and then I see the place I was looking for, that I’d seen the last time I was over here. And which I knew was here. Which had to be here.

Professional Psychic

Fortunes Told

Tarot or Palm Reading

Walk-in

I park the Matador out front, which is a dangerous move to start with, but I figure the psychic has got to have some control over what goes on outside her store and in the neighborhood — she’s psychic, after all, right? — and I go inside.

It’s dark. No crystal balls. She’s in possession of this gross corduroy sofa that smells of spilled meatloaf and cat food, and over to the side there’s a partially assembled table and two chairs, and a church rummage sale table lamp with birds and bunnies painted on it, and over on the walls there’s a Laurel and Hardy clock, with their eyes moving back and forth, like pendulums except not quite. There’s other Laurel and Hardy stuff in the room: L&H porcelain cups, and a souvenir L&H dinner plate mounted on the wall, and a one-foot-high L&H statue set in the corner. On the other wall is a picture of down-by-the-old-mill-stream that you’d buy at Woolworth’s. By my ankles a black vampire-cat is stroking against my legs and purring. God, I hate cats. I’m the only girl my age I know who hates cats.

Meanwhile, country-western, moron music if you ask me, Tricia Yearwood or somebody, your-cheatin’-this-and-your-cheatin’-that, is playing off some staticky AM radio in the back. I hear this voice, “I’ll be right with you,” and then the sound of a toilet flushing and somebody gargling.

In comes Mrs. Maggaroulian, which I know is her name because her business card is out on the table, and her name is also in little print on the front window, and she says, “Hi, I’ll be with you in a minute, honey.”

I look at the wall. She’s posted the prices. Tarot readings are twelve dollars, and palm readings are twelve dollars, and the guaranteed predictions of the future based on psychic determinism, which she happens to know how to do, are also twelve dollars. It’s all twelve dollars each. If I get everything she’s offering, one from column A and one from column B, plus dessert on column C, this is going to cost me a full day’s salary.

But! you can’t get your hands on the future for free, fuck and alas, so I shell out almost every piece of folded money I have, and I give them to Mrs. Maggaroulian, and she puts on her reading glasses that she has on a beaded chain around her neck, and she locks the front door and puts my money in a little steel box underneath the table, where it’s hiding. By this time I am noticing that Mrs. Maggaroulian is big, I mean she is really big, the way a giant is big, at least compared to the way women usually are shaped and sized, and she has a mohair wig, it looks like, and something there on her jaw that looks like facial hair. Her nose looks like it’s made out of modeling clay. Her dress didn’t even come off the rack, ’cause it’s a tablecloth fastened together with safety pins. She wears black nail polish, not the sexy black but the scary black. She’s got big hands and feet, big hoppers and big choppers. This Ypsi chick is not the Better Business Bureau’s idea of a respectable psychic. But, duh, if she were prettier she’d be broadcasting on the Dionne Warwick psychic network at forty dollars per minute and she’d be whispering predictions to Oprah. Hey, I don’t give a shit if she is a drag queen, I’m cool with that, she could be the fucking Queen of the May for all I care, I just want the future out of her, provided it’s one hundred percent accurate.

She sits me down at her table and says, Honey, whatcha want to know about? So I say that I’ve got this boyfriend, Oscar… and Mrs. Maggaroulian nods, ’cause of course she knows what I want to know, being able to read my mind. She says we’ll do a palm reading first.

She takes my hand, opens up the fingers and studies my palm like a road map. She frowns. “This is your love line,” she says, tracing her finger along a crease. “Notice this.”

I look at it. “What?”

“You have a relationship with this Oscar? This Oscar relationship,” Mrs. Maggaroulian says, “is soon going to be over, it would appear.”

“How do you mean, ‘over’? You sure about that?”

“We could ask the cards,” Mrs. Maggaroulian informs me, as if she really doesn’t like my hand at all and doesn’t want to read it anymore, and she takes out her tarot cards, which, get this, she kisses first, on the box. Me, I would never do that. I would never kiss a deck of cards. She tells the cards in painful detail the questions she wants to ask and she proceeds to lay them out on the table. I will not tell about the cards that came up — that is such bad luck — but it was, like, a magical mystery train wreck.

“Well,” says Mrs. Maggaroulian, in a sort of guy-imitating-a-woman Monty Python bagpipe drag queen voice, “I’ve certainly seen better cards, I’ll say that.”

“Is there any hope?” I asked. “For the two of us, Oscar and me? ’Cause I love him and everything.”

“Did you bring any item of his?” Mrs. Maggaroulian asks, emphasizing the word item like it was word-candy. “Any of his possessions? That he’s touched often?”

“Besides me, you mean? Yeah. This sock,” I say, plopping it down on the table, “and this track team baton.” I wait for a moment, and I do my very best to grin. “And this knife.”

She takes the sock in one hand, and the relay baton in the other. She looks up at me, and the wig on her head shifts a little, to the right, toward one o’clock. I can hear Laurel and Hardy ticking my precious time away. I’m afraid she’s going to tell me about her glory days when she was on the track team herself. “I don’t have to hold Oscar’s knife,” Mrs. Maggaroulian says. “You can hold Oscar’s knife. I can see everything clearly enough without it. Honey, what did you say your name was?”

“Chloé.”

“Chloé, honey, you know we’re not always right. Sometimes it’s a good idea to take the future with a grain of salt. We psychics, well, I don’t know. Psychics have bad days, too. We have our up days and our down days.” She puts the baton and the sock back on the table.

“Is this your bad day, Mrs. Maggaroulian?”

“Yes, it is, dear. I have a headache. I have a very terrible headache. All those little hammers.”

“What do you see about Oscar, Mrs. Maggaroulian?”

The room really filled up with the smell of meatloaf right about then, like a freight train of meatloaf just went by. I was beginning to want to get out of there, in the worst possible way. I could feel the cells of my skin revolting against the room. My individual skin cells wanted to get free of me just for being there. Mrs. Maggaroulian kept trying to smile at me, and she kept failing at it. “Well, honey,” she said, “everything I see about your boyfriend is not so hotsy-totsy. Both Laurel and Hardy are telling me that his future prospects are not bright. Did you say he was still alive?”

“Oscar? Oh yeah, he’s still alive.” I decided not to ask her about Laurel and Hardy, or how she talked to them. Some things don’t stand much looking into.

“Well, that’s wonderful. You go home to him and give him a big kiss and a bear hug, honey. That’s what I would do if I were you. You know, I haven’t seen all that much in your future, so I’m going to…” She stood up and went over to her little steel cashier’s box and took two fives out of it and handed them back to me. “I’m going to give you a little refund. Ten dollars. Think of this as a refund on your future. You should stop and get a cheeseburger on the way home, honey. Get two cheeseburgers. And some fries. Take it all to Oscar. He’ll be so grateful, I can guarantee. If you love him, he’s bound to stay alive for a while. Then go out bowling tonight with him like a good girlfriend. Do you like bowling? You do go bowling, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

“Okay. Go bowling with Oscar. ’Cause what I see is… you want something to eat? I’m making some meatloaf back there, in the kitchen.”

“No thanks.” I figured I had to ask. “Is it bad, Mrs. Maggaroulian, what you see? You gotta tell me. I paid you all this money. It’s like this week’s savings. Wages and even tips, that our customers put in the jar on the front counter? I have to know. About Oscar?”

“Listen to me.” She gave me a moment to look into her eyes. There was another person living in there, at least. You couldn’t tell if what was inside Mrs. Maggaroulian was human or just an honorary human. Maybe she was a resident alien. The IRS wouldn’t dare audit her, ’cause they’d find out she was an alternate life-form, and they don’t have income tables for that. “I can’t believe he’s alive, this Oscar of yours,” she said. “But if you really love him, he’ll stay alive for a while longer. Trust me on that. People can keep other people alive, you know. Now go, honey. You drive home.”

“I will.” I stopped at the door. “Mrs. Maggaroulian,” I said, “are you really a girl?”

She didn’t even look up. “No, dear,” she said, sniffing. “I am a lady.”

WHEN I CAME INTO the apartment, Oscar was all over the bed, half-asleep after his exertions and his shower and his beers. He had the TV on to baseball, and his eyes were closed, and I figured, worst-case scenario, that he was dead. So I took my shoes off and I put the two cheeseburgers and the big thing of French fries on the kitchen table, and I went running over to where he was, and I gave him a good shake. And, just like that — presto — his eyes open.

“Hey, Chloé,” he says, “whassup?”

I’m straddling him, and shaking him, and he smiles at me. “How was basketball?” I ask.

“Great,” he says. “Man, I was so hot, I was like an action figure. Hey, I see you took the car. Wheredja go?”

“Ypsi,” I said. “I went to a psychic. Mrs. Maggaroulian. I wanted to find some things out.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Cool. What’d she say?”

And that’s when I took a deep breath, and I looked down at Oscar, and I said, “Oscar, I’ve got this idea. Don’t get mad at me, okay?”

“Naw,” Oscar says, “I wouldn’t get mad. What’s your idea?”

“Well,” I say, “I know it’s early and all, and maybe we should go slow and everything, and I know that girls aren’t supposed to say this, but after talking to Mrs. Maggaroulian I’ve been thinking that maybe I should. I mean, this is going to sound real weird, ’cause here it is Saturday afternoon… anyway, what I was wondering was, Oscar, maybe we should get married. Oscar, would you marry me?”

And Oscar, who’s said that he loves me about a thousand times in the last week alone, he doesn’t even stop to think about it, he just sits up a little in bed, and he says, “Oh, yeah.” Just that, “Oh, yeah.” Like it’s a great idea that he hadn’t thought of recently, but should have. Then he says, “That’s a real cool idea, Chloé. You and me married. Like I’d be your husband, and you’d be my wife, right? Wow. I’d like to do that.”

Some things you think can’t ever happen, and then they do.

I gave him the hugest kiss he’d ever had, and then I went over and got the bag, and we did a four-alarm fuck, and afterward I fed him the cheeseburgers, both of them, his and mine too, from my hand to his mouth, bite after bite after bite after bite after bite.

FOURTEEN

YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE? I hate it when someone turns to me and says, “What’re you thinking, Bradley? Tell me. What’re you thinking?” Well, no. If it’s a-penny-for-your-thought time, here’s your penny back. Because, first of all, it’s private, whatever my thoughts are — and don’t think I’ll tell you all my thoughts, either — but secondly, most of the time I don’t, in the way of things, have any thoughts. There aren’t any thoughts, per se, is what I’m saying. Day after day it’s a long hallway up there, just a yard sale, interrupted with random images of my paintings, or my dog, or the coffee store, or memories, or a woman, her face or her body or something she said, all of it in free fall through the synapses.

And I don’t care if I’m mixing my metaphors. This is my second marriage I’m talking about now. I can damn well mix my metaphors on that marriage if I want to. I’ve got my rights.

The reason I say all this is that I couldn’t stop asking Diana what she was thinking. We’d be somewhere, like a restaurant, before or during our engagement, and she’d drop into these states, staring off into space or down at the breadsticks in the glass container. Then she’d look at the butter plate or the hors d’oeuvres instead of at me. And I just knew she was carrying on a serious conversation with herself. You could all but see her lips moving.

So I’d say, “Hey, Diana. What’re you thinking?”

She’d smile, suddenly. She’d sort of pick at her engagement ring. “Nothing.” As if she had been recalled to Earth from some asteroid belt or other. “Nothing. Why do you ask, Bradley?”

When they — women — are serious about you, they’ll use your full name. Bradley. “You just looked deep in thought, that’s all.”

“I’m thinking about us,” she’d say, and reach for my hand. Another big smile, like a smile you’d do for a flashbulb, a smile like arriving in France after seven cramped hours on the plane, that’s what she’d give me. But those smiles of hers didn’t even have a half-life. They were on her face, optically illusional, and then they’d be gone so quickly you couldn’t be sure you’d seen them at all.

She’d go absent without leave at meals, she’d go absent in the car, and she’d go absent after our lovemaking. She looked like a woman gazing out from the railing of a cruise ship toward an island of some sort, and her bangs would fall over her eyebrows while her feet twitched in time to an interior melody. She was a great one for examining the ceiling. The molding fascinated her. Lying beside me, she could carry off her fleshly existence away from me, but, after a moment, she couldn’t. I mean, my God, I was so in love with her that I almost didn’t notice. I thought I was made of plutonium, I was that powerful. Radioactive Man. I would imagine Diana walking toward me, looking at me with recognition — I am your woman, you are my man, we are mated — and I’d think: How did I get this lucky? Not that I’m selling myself short.

Other men envied me, I was sure. I longed for her. I looked forward to her, not to her sweetness, because she didn’t have any of that, but to her acids and spices, the way she made me feel more alive. To hear Diana talking or to kiss her, to wake up beside her, you’d just know, I mean any man in his right mind would know, that she was a goddess, and not one of those New Age goddesses either, but one of the old ones, the genuine kind of goddess, the sort they don’t make anymore, with lightning coming out of her eyes. She filled my eyes with her beauty; her eyes put me on trial.

I mean, Diana was a handful, but after one of our largish moments she would lie in a still, solemn posture while her feet beat in time to her inaudible music and her fingers touched my ribs like a fretboard, and she would stare off ceilingward, as if… well, it was then that I’d ask her what she was thinking, and she’d turn to me and give me a flashbulb smile, and she’d say, “I’m thinking about you, honey.”

And I didn’t know whether that was good news or bad, given the fact that she was almost frowning, and her lower lip beginning to stick out, pouty, as if she were reading poetry or something like that that’s more trouble to figure out than it’s worth. I didn’t really want to know what she was thinking after such moments. I just kept that door shut. Bluebeard kept one of his castle doors shut too. Well, I said to myself: she’s a lawyer, and she’s contemplating her next case.

At our wedding, which was not at a church, because she and I didn’t believe in anything that large, but which occurred in the expansive back yard of a reception hall near the Saline River, she had said, “I do,” with considerable force. We were under a large white canopy and there would be dancing afterward. But she had seemed almost surprised when at the conclusion of the ceremony I leaned down to kiss her, the way you do when the ritual is finished. She was made light-headed by my kiss, the fact of it. You could tell from the way she looked at me. Her eyes grew wide and she seemed frightened for a split second as my lips attached themselves to hers. She said later that she had been studying the pattern of the woodwork in the bandstand and had been distracted. Distracted? At our wedding? For the kiss? I used to think that technically the wedding doesn’t happen unless you kiss each other.

After the kiss, though, she remembered to smile. She could be polite. And following the reception, we had a horse-drawn carriage take us to the motel. The carriage was antique-elegant, with inlaid wood though it had a wet bar inside, and a TV, and as we got into it, we were pelted with rice and flowers by her lawyer friends and my artist-and-coffee friends, and by our parents and relatives and hangers-on. Chloé and Oscar were there in thrift-shop formal attire, and they threw flowers at us, too. My sister Agatha was there, and Harold, and my nephews, my friends, and my father and mother, and some of Diana’s friends including an old boyfriend of hers named David, whom I didn’t exactly get to meet, not then.

The sun was out, not a cloud in the sky. The driver wore a top hat. This was unlike my first wedding to Kathryn, which took place in city hall, where people do not typically wear costumes. We clip-clopped away from the reception hall, and I kissed Diana again, and she didn’t seem so surprised this time. The horse smelled of straw and oats, I remember.

My best man had said, long before this, You may end up like the happiest man on Earth, old Buddy, or you may end up like someone on daytime television.

During the first night, after we had made love as man and wife, as wedded partners, instead of just lovers, Diana said, “Bradley, you’re such a nice guy,” as she drifted off to sleep. I thought: Well, I’ll take my compliments where I can get them, but “nice” is not what a man wants to hear under these particular circumstances. I mean, she had nothing to complain about. I had satisfied her. She looked satisfied. We had groaned together during our lovemaking. But “nice”? When you make love to a goddess, you want a fierce compliment. Or speechlessness. Speechlessness will do just fine.

DIANA’S AGORAPHOBIA PRESENTED a bit of a problem as regards the honeymoon.

Her idea had been that we should remain in Ann Arbor and perhaps, as a kind of respite from ordinary life, stay in different motels and hotels around town for a week or two. We could laze in lounge chairs near the indoor pools and order vast crazy meals complete with champagne from room service, if there happened to be room service. We would make love a lot and metaphorically cement ourselves together. We would go to movies if we felt like it. Despite its attractions, however, I found this entire prospect unappealing. It lacked, I don’t know, the charisma of the exotic.

She didn’t like open spaces at all, and she didn’t care for locales she’d never been to before. She did not like to travel and did not care for airplanes, except when her legal business required rapid transit. Nevertheless, I suggested that we drive to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and spend our honeymoon at a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Gogebic, near the Porcupine Mountains. Eventually I wore her down. I asserted myself, and she shrugged — Jesus, she had a beautiful shrug — and agreed. I’d been to this B&B, the Porcupine Inn, before, alone, and thought she’d like the vistas. We held hands as we talked about what we’d do there.

We boarded Bradley at a kennel. Chloé and Oscar would mind the store. Harry Ginsberg said he’d keep an eye on the house. Diana hadn’t sold her house. She had rented it out.

I suspected that we were in for trouble when we began to cross the Mackinac Bridge. Diana began to breathe hard, and she put her hand to her face and smoothed her eyebrows. I shouldn’t say this about my ex-wife, but she farted, I’m not kidding, out of sheer fright. The sky and the bridge and the water far below her were oddly and intensely incorrect to her at that moment, or so she reported. You can’t see much from up on that bridge except the infinity of fresh water and some uncommonly distant islands. Spatial malevolence. She felt this wrongness surrounding her and ganging up against her. The empty air was unpleasantly interested in her. Funny to find this phobia in a woman so strong in other ways. I turned the radio on, thinking it would help, but the radio was tuned to an oldies station, and the first line out of the speakers was, “Well, I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day…” and of course Diana reached down and snapped off that song.

It’s not unusual for people to go phobic on that bridge. Sometimes they just stop the car at one end and have to be escorted, or driven, to the other side. We made it intact to St. Ignace, the first town you meet up with in the Upper Peninsula, but her episode of horizon panic had established a bad precedent.

MOST HUMAN BEINGS have never been to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It retains its somewhat mysterious origins. Cartographers have mapped it, all right, but there are places up there where visitors have been maybe once or twice but never returned, because they didn’t want to return, and never would want to. I’m not talking about Marquette, where they filmed Anatomy of a Murder, but places like Matchwood, where there’s a busted American Motors dealer sign standing near an abandoned farmhouse, and not another habitation for miles, and large fields where they gave up farming years ago, and dense forests filled with trees — I do not exaggerate — of a kind you never saw before, probably hybrid trees resulting from the mating, it could be, of white pines and willow trees, grafted together out of sheer loneliness. I mean, these are odd-looking trees, barbaric and sad, and there are entire forests of them growing unobserved and unlabeled up there.

For the tourists, there are little tiny zoos scattered just off the main highways, with animals tucked away inside cages the size of carry-on suitcases, and other visitor attractions, like mystery spots and restaurants where they make pasties that the locals eat. You drive across this expanse of peculiarity as all the radio stations fade, all of them, Brahms and the Ronettes and Toad the Wet Sprocket and Hank Williams, and you start to wonder what got into you, that you brought your brand-new wife up here, the goddess whose scary wondrous beauty put you on trial. The broad open vistas fill you with second thoughts bordering on consternation. When you get to the waterfalls, you have to pay to see them; you have to pay a guy chewing a toothpick who somehow managed to buy the whole goddamn waterfall and is now going to sell you the view.

As we crossed the Upper Peninsula, Diana and I tried to be cheerful — we were both wearing jaunty hats and sending postcards to our friends every seventy miles or so — but by the time we reached Lake Gogebic, the distant aroma of a mistake was in the air, and it was my mistake, and it seemed to be going in several different directions at once. But after we unpacked at the B&B and tried out the bed, my spirits improved. We had an upstairs room filled with interior decoration antique bric-a-brac, and a bed close by a window just to the left of the headboard, and some cut flowers there on the bedside table, next to a simpering porcelain tabby cat. The window’s glass was flawed and antique, so that the lake outside asserted itself in several visual dimensions, several different geometrical planes.

“Look,” I said, pointing outside. Early evening, and the sun had given the lake a golden tint, the kind you see in bad paintings and bad movies, though this, I should quickly add, had been a good day and not a cheap imitation of a good day. She raised herself in the bed and lay across me, so that her breasts brushed against me. I was sitting there, propped up against the pillows and the headboard, reading a local tourist guidebook. It was so friendly and so erotic at the same time, Diana draped in that manner over me. And I thought: this is what marriage should be, this intimacy, eros and friendship, Diana and me, exciting and calm.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Very beautiful.” She just rested there, stretched across me, gazing languidly out through the window, elbows on the bed next to my legs, and I looked down at her back and felt like touching each one of the bumps of her spine consecutively. I traced designs on her back. I drew, with my finger, a dragon rising out of the valley above her waist and flaring upward with powerful wings toward her shoulders. “What’re you doing?” she asked.

“I’m drawing a dragon.”

“Hmmm. Tell me when you’re finished.”

I drew some scales on its sides, and some fire from its mouth. She was giving me pleasure as I drew it, so I slowed down my draftsmanship. “I’m done,” I said, after a minute or two.

She turned over. I cradled her head in my right hand. I put my left hand placidly on her rib cage and then on her breast. She gazed up at me. We were loving and familiar. “You’re so sweet,” she said. “Tell me you love me.”

“I love you, Diana,” I said. “I love you very much.” The truth was easy for me to say.

She smiled. “Yes, that was nice,” she said. “You know, I love you, too. What do you love about me, Bradley? Really?”

“How beautiful and smart you are,” I said. With my thumb I twirled her hair. “I love that. I don’t know,” I said. “It’s like love doesn’t have any reason. I can’t stop looking at you.” My voice had dropped to a hoarse murmur. “I go to sleep with your image in my head, and when I wake up, it’s still there. I think you’re a goddess,” I said, meaning it. My cock had stayed up, and the way we were positioned, she could probably feel it beneath her, tickling her back, right where I had drawn that dragon. “Why do you love me?” I asked, still in a whisper, a little frightened by the way she might answer. We’d never had this discussion before.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know?”

“You’re a better person than I am.”

“You love me for that?”

“Bradley, I don’t think people should talk about these things.”

“Why not?”

“Some matters you shouldn’t verbalize. I mean really, Bradley” — and here she raised her hand and caressed my cheek — “all this love business is just nature’s way of getting more babies into the world. The rest of it is just all this romance nonsense.” She struggled for the word. “The rest of it is just superstructure.”

“Well, maybe. But what if,” I said, still gazing at her, with her sly sexy smile like a little dawn on her face, “what if the love we feel, what if it’s central, what if it’s what makes the world’s soul possible, what if it’s what made the world and keeps it running, and the babies, the babies are also a product of that, our soul-making, not the only product, but…”

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “You’re so weird and metaphysical. For a coffee guy.”

“About what?”

“That you would say that. That you would say that love isn’t just a necessity for… biology.” I had my hand cupped around her breast, and she had her hand on my cheek, and we were having an argument, though it was still sounding like love talk. “Bradley, what are we going to do here? At Lake Gogebic?”

“We’re on a honeymoon,” I said, noting the obvious, which I had hoped at that moment I wouldn’t have to do. “We’ll have meals and make love. That’s about all.” She turned, so that now her back was to me again. “And we could go outside. We could explore. We could take hikes.”

“You know I don’t like hikes.”

“You’re in shape, Diana. You run in the gym.”

“You know what I mean.” She gazed outside. “This doesn’t have anything to do with fitness. The outdoors gives me the creeps.”

“But look,” I said. “Look what I’ve brought.” I pulled myself out from under her and went over to my suitcase, from which I pulled two whistles, the kind that football coaches use, with the little balls in them. They really make a racket. “Hey, hey,” I said hopelessly.

“What’re those for?”

“You get lost in the woods, you just blow.”

“ ‘I get lost in the woods, I just blow,’ ” she repeated. “What is it about my agoraphobia, Bradley — does it make you feel better that I have it? An advantage? You brought those along? I mean, why now, of all times, do you want to worry it?”

“I don’t want to worry it,” I said. “It wasn’t that. The thing is, I saw the two of us, walking outdoors, and I thought: What can I do for Diana? I can help her get outside, I can help her with the wide open spaces.” I handed the whistle to her.

She took it and tossed it in her hand. Then, sweetly, she raised her other hand and put her index finger on my lower lip. She played her finger back and forth on my lip. “We’re not compatible, you know,” she said. Her eyes hardened and for an instant looked through me a little. I thought that was such an odd thing for her to say that I refused, almost, to hear it. I just felt her finger on my lip.

“It’s not compatibility,” I said. “It’s how you manage it. How loving you are.”

“I’m loving with my friends,” Diana said, “and I’m mean to my lovers.” She caressed my mouth. “ ‘Just put your lips together and blow,’ ” she said, quoting from somewhere. “Oh, screw it,” she said. “Put that whistle down and make love to me again, since you want to.” She pointed to me and what was obvious, my well-meaning and innocent erection. So I did, I made love to her, because she asked me to, and because I wanted to, even though — and it’s hard to explain this — my feelings were hurt and I was angry, so I was meaner to her in bed than I usually am, rougher, more abrupt, and slowly it dawned on me, as I watched her respond, that she liked me that way, almost as if she was used to it, and I thought, Uh-oh, and kept it to myself.

You can have good sex on your honeymoon and still suspect that there’s something fishy going on.

THE NEXT DAY we went over to the Porcupine Mountains. They’re worn down in that region and the state forests and parkland have been crisscrossed with paths, but it’s a moody landscape given to early morning fogs and indescribable forest sounds. They tear through the silences every now and then. Out of nowhere, a half-mile behind you, a baby cries once, then quiets. Tree branches snap and fall in front of you. These seemingly harmless nature scenes fill you with premonitions of bucolic doom.

We veered off the main highway onto a county road and continued driving until the pavement turned to dirt, and then parked when we found a stand of woods with a marker for a path. I myself had grown interested in the mushrooms. I’d brought a sketchbook and sketched a few. They caught my attention with their red caps and their structural mockery of flowers and umbrellas and sexual organs. Diana wouldn’t touch them and seemed puzzled, or even saddened, by my interest in them.

Diana’s hair was swept back and held under that cap, and she was wearing a light yellow tee-shirt. She’d brought along a jacket in case it started to rain, and after we’d been out there for an hour or two, it began to drizzle. The drizzle was so fine that the water couldn’t even be glimpsed as it fell. You could see its presence as a graying factor in the air.

I’d also brought a small field guide — my jacket was full of pockets — and was checking the identifying marks of what I thought was a destroying angel when I heard Diana blowing her whistle. I tripped my way over several dead logs and through some underbrush that I couldn’t identify until I found her standing near a stump. She was shaking, but it didn’t quite make sense, because she was smiling that tough smile of hers. Her breasts heaved under her tee-shirt.

“I heard something,” she said. “Also, I think we’re lost.”

I told her that we weren’t lost, that my map said that a road existed on the other side of the ridge ahead of us. She shrugged — God, I loved that! — and agreed to follow me.

As we were walking on the path I saw a small bronze engraved plaque that someone had affixed to a tree.

On this spot in 1983

E. L. Orlan discovered that the meaning of his life

lay in learning, friendship and love,

and service to others.

I pointed it out to Diana, but she just laughed. She was personally way beyond the meaning of life. She was making, I thought, heroic efforts to love the outdoors, but she had her limits. I took her hand.

Behind us and then to our right came a two-note call, neither bird nor animal. More like the rubbing of an agitated branch against a tree trunk.

Nobody was around. “You wanna make love here?” I asked. “You wanna mess around in the woods?” She just looked at me. We walked down a slope toward a patchwork clearing. She was not about to get herself laid in the woods. What had I been thinking?

A road became visible ahead, opposite the clearing. A white farm house, with a wide front yard dotted with objects too small to be seen from a distance, stood sagging and in need of paint on the other side of the dirt road.

We crossed the road and looked down at the objects for sale in the front yard: several bright blue Virgin Mary shrines, wooden deer and rabbits, and a nondescript collection of other creatures made out of ceramic God-knows-what, all of them with big eyes, all of them smiling without sincerity. They had the mean cuteness of painted souvenirs. The phrase blunt instruments came into my head. I imagined a disgruntled wife pitching one of these skunks at her husband after a long weekend. I almost tripped over a sign.

EVERYTHING HERE

FOR SALE

RING THE DOORBELL

“Of course it’s awful,” Diana said. “But that’s why we’re here.” She held up a possum, aimed it at me, and made terrible kissing noises.

Sometimes she enjoyed slumming around in junk stores. Castoffs and ripped, dented things flashed a spark in her. She fever-grinned at me. So I shrugged. “This makes good taste seem easy,” I said. “Dull, too.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She put the possum back down on the ground. “You know, we could make love right here, right on the ground, now, and it wouldn’t help at all. This stuff is more complicated than you realize.”

I was thinking about what she could possibly have meant by that when the screen door slammed and a blind woman came toward us down the porch steps. I knew she was blind because her blue eyes were milky and she looked in no particular direction. Like the animals, she too was smiling. And like them, her eyes were slightly too large for her face. Her brown hair sagged, if that’s the word, under a hair net.

She wore a brown cardigan sweater, and as I watched she fished a cigarette out of the left pocket and a Zippo lighter out of the right. She illuminated the cigarette and took a long stagy puff. She had the pleasant formal manners of a troll under whose bridge you have just wandered. “Can I be of any help for you?” she asked. “Is there any assistance I may be of?”

“Oh, no,” Diana said, and she glanced in her perturbed stylish way toward the horizon. “We were hiking. Now we’re here.”

“Now you’re here,” the troll-lady said in an echo-chamber voice. I gazed at her with great uneasiness. I have never liked men or women who live on dirt roads. It’s a matter of temperament, mine or theirs. I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway. “You’re both so young,” she said. “Well, certainly take a look around. Take your time.”

“We were just married,” Diana said quickly. The proprietor of this lawn exhaled some smoke straight up. I wondered if it might be a signal to someone we couldn’t see, some message or other. Emotional health is a relative matter once you’re away from the cities. I thought it was time for us to go.

“My name is Mrs. Watkins,” the old woman said. She held out her hand, and I shook it for the god of politeness. Then Diana did. “Yes, that’s a good woman’s grip,” Mrs. Watkins muttered, taking another puff from her cigarette. “I’m so pleased you’ve visited me. But you must come into the back yard. You must see the children. These,” she swept her hand in the direction of the animals, “are just for show.”

Then she turned around and walked toward the back of the house. She seemed to know where everything was. We followed her. I wanted to take the whistle out of my pocket and blow it. Diana reached for my hand. She appeared to be having a perfectly good time. The huge air and the horizon weren’t getting on her back and weighing her down in the conventional ways.

I decided to be tactless. “You manage so well,” I said to Mrs. Watkins. “Considering.” Then we saw the back yard.

“You think I’m blind, but I’m not,” Mrs. Watkins said. “I have cataracts and things, but I’m not blind.” As she said this, she stared at my right elbow. “I can see all the colors, and I can see you have many pockets in your jacket. It looks like you’ve been picking mushrooms.”

I wasn’t exactly listening to her at that moment, because I had fixed my attention on her back yard. The children were in front of me, stone children and plaster children, in various postures of disarray.

One boy stood with his hands in the air, appearing to hold a kite string. Another lay on the ground with his head propped in his right hand, gazing blankly off into the distance, but in my direction. Those children had been there forever. Mrs. Watkins walked toward the kite-flying boy and put her hand on his head. “My husband made these,” she said. “He made all these children on weekends.”

I noticed the past tense. Close by me was a girl on her knees with her hands together in prayer and her head tilted upward. She had been outdoors for as long as these mountains had been here. Part of her face was wearing away, probably from rain or from the blind woman’s caresses. Although it’s probably a shame for me to admit it, I’ll say here and now that I don’t think statuary is any form of art. You can put it in a museum, and I’ll walk right past it. I don’t want to look at or touch those things. Rodin, Michelangelo, Degas: just clutter to me.

On the other side of the praying girl was another girl — very white and also plaster, my guess was — bending down and looking for a worm. There was a price tag on one of her fingers. It had smeared in the rain, and I couldn’t tell what her asking price was.

“They’re all of them very sweet,” Mrs. Watkins said. “My husband loved making these children. It was a constant love and occupied his daytime leisure hours, such as they were.” She looked up at me but her gaze missed my face and focused on the gray Michigan sky. Quite possibly she was kind. I had no way of knowing. She reached behind her and put her hand on a boy with an open mouth. He appeared to be singing rather than shouting. “Anything interest you here?”

“It all interests me,” Diana said. And then she put her hand underneath my shirt and reached for me around the waist. I could tell she wanted to kiss me in front of Mrs. Watkins, and I wasn’t going to let it happen. Diana’s hand went up my back and I felt the shivers coming on. Being among all these cement children bothered me. It was too much like being with Kathryn at the Humane Society.

Mrs. Watkins stubbed out her cigarette in an open space between two children and deftly reached in her left pocket for another one. I admired her Zippo. Those things could really light cigarettes, and they closed with a satisfactory metallic smack. “We get all kinds of people here,” she said, exhaling more smoke from her freshly lit cigarette. “Most of the children have been sold, though, as you can see.”

“Do you have names for them?” Diana asked.

“Oh no,” the old woman said, leaning back. “That would be sentimental.”

“I think we have to go now,” I announced. All this was more than enough for one day. “Our car is parked on the other side of the ridge, and we need time to get back before it gets too dark to see. We’re on our honeymoon,” I added, without thinking. It was still midday. No one paid any attention to me. I was noticing that most of the children’s faces had worn away a bit too much, and the loss of detail was unnerving. No doubt there would be a clearance sale fairly soon.

“I want that one,” Diana said, pointing toward the reclining boy whose head was propped up by his arm. “How much is it? No, I mean, how much is he?”

“I could let you have him for thirty-six dollars,” the old woman said.

“Bradley, you’ll have to bring the car around here to pick this up,” Diana said, smiling curiously at me and scratching her scalp as if in thought. “We can’t lug it back.”

“You didn’t ask me if I wanted it.”

“Oh, this is for me,” Diana told me. “I’ll just put it somewhere.” She was counting out dollar bills into Mrs. Watkins’s hand.

“What mushrooms you got there?” Mrs. Watkins asked me, pointing toward my jacket pockets.

“I don’t know their names,” I said.

“Hand them to me,” she said. “I know mushrooms.”

“No, no, I don’t think so,” I said.

Diana put her hands into my own pockets and pulled all the mushrooms out. She turned them over to the old woman, who dropped them on the ground. Then Mrs. Watkins picked up one with a red cap in her left hand — her right hand still held the cigarette — and sniffed it several times. “This is called a pungent russula,” she said. “It’s not poisonous but it’ll make you vomit. Emetica, they call it. Very delicate structure though.” She passed her fingers around the mushroom’s gills before handing it to Diana. Then she reached down for another one. I wanted to get out of there but Diana was watching all this with considerable attention. Something was happening, and I didn’t know what it was.

More sniffing from Mrs. Watkins. “This is a club foot. It’s no good for eating. The woods are full of those.” She threw it on the ground near one of the boys and reached down again. “Ah,” she said. She stubbed out her second cigarette. “Now this one is something. This one’s a parasol. This is one of the best.”

Then, and I can’t say I was prepared for this, Mrs. Watkins — with her cataracts — bit off a tiny piece of the mushroom and chewed it. “Yes,” she said, smiling, like the ebullient hobgoblin she was, “that’s indeed what it is. Here.” She held it toward Diana.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Don’t you do that.”

“Shut up, Bradley,” Diana said. “Just shut up.”

“No no no,” I said and forced it out of her hand.

“Give it back here,” she said. “Or this will become very serious.”

“This is serious right now,” I said.

Mrs. Watkins looked at us with her inaccurate smile. Perhaps she meant well.

“You don’t know what that is,” I said. “You don’t know what this is all about. Stop all of this, please, Diana.”

“Oh yes, I do,” she said. She pulled the mushroom out of my hand. “This is about us.” She bit into the mushroom. I watched her chew and swallow. Then she leaned toward me. She whispered. “It’s a feeling. This is about this exact moment and where we are exactly right now.” She was biting off more mushroom, and chewing and swallowing. “This is about a favor that is being done to me. This is a spell. This is a charm. From one woman to another.”

“Oh, dear,” the crone said. “A quarrel.” She turned around and went back into her house. She stumbled on the stairs going up.

ON THE WAY HOME, with the reclining boy stashed in the trunk, Diana said to me, “When we get back, I’m going to make such love to you, it’ll take your roof right off.”

When we arrived back at the Porcupine Inn, the bedroom smelled of lilacs, even though it was the wrong season for lilacs. We left the statue, or whatever it was, in the car. I wasn’t about to carry it up to the bedroom. It might have been a joke, that boy, but I couldn’t stop thinking of him, all thirty or forty pounds of him, ensconced in the trunk gazing through the darkness at the spare tire. Up in the bedroom, between us, Diana brought more fever to our lovemaking than she ever had before, but it was the wrong fever, as if she were trying to get rid of an internal pressure through physical means. She would ride me and close her eyes, and she would bend down to kiss my eyelids, and there wouldn’t be a sprig of affection in it, not a single solitary sign of love. It was just something she needed. She churned away and when she’d whip her head back and forth, the sweat from her forehead fell on my face. She slapped me several times as a sex thing, and as often as she came, it wasn’t enough, she wanted to come more often, and harder. She knocked the porcelain tabby cat off the bedside table, and the flowers too. They lay insensate on the floor in a puddle of water. She told me we were going to skip dinner. The mushroom didn’t make her sick, but I guess it gave her some sort of permission. It went further and profoundly into night, all this mushroom sex, and then on and on toward morning. I’d fall asleep and wake up to feel her working on me. She wouldn’t let me sleep. We had bruises. I never imagined this happening, but no matter how naive you sometimes think I am, I knew that whole night, by then, watching her, that she was in love with someone else, intensely, and had always been, and been tormented by it, and now she was taking it out on me, and making it obvious and those were her thoughts, the ones she couldn’t tell me, not for a penny, not for a pound.

We had some great times, Diana and me, but we couldn’t last, and we didn’t. We brought the statue of the boy home, and Diana put it into the garden close by where the petunias and pansies had been despite my protests.

FIFTEEN

THERE’S A STORY of Kierkegaard’s that I especially like. A philosopher builds an enormous palace, but to everyone’s surprise he himself does not live in the palace but establishes his residence in a dog kennel next to it. The philosopher is invariably offended when it is pointed out to him that he lives in this ludicrous manner. But how else could I have built the palace, the philosopher asks, if I had not also lived in the dog kennel?

It is like a Jewish joke. Kierkegaard made great efforts to live in the palace of thought he himself had built, but of course he could not manage it, given to polemical rages as he was, and to a peculiar kind of spiritual unhappiness driven by heart-spite. Besides, one eventually grows attached to one’s own doghouse and the daily bowl of scraps. Stubbornly we stay on in the dog kennel to prove that we were correct to have established ourselves in there in the first place.

The story about Kierkegaard I like is the one in which he falls drunkenly off a sofa at a party. Lying on the floor, he starts to refer to himself in the third person when the other guests try to help him up. “Oh, just leave it there,” he says, speaking of his body. “Let the maids sweep it up tomorrow morning.”

THE NEXT TIME Aaron called on the telephone — like the secret police, the terror experts, he always made the bell ring in the dead center of the night — he informed me that the money I had sent him was an “installment.” In consideration of emotional crimes against him, he said, he would regard his intentional death as postponed until after the next such payment.

I was braver this time. I told him he was talking nonsense.

Between us in the electronic ether, the thousands of miles, a silence brewed and thickened, was salted and seasoned, mixed with the sounds of his breathing.

Nonsense? he asked. Nonsense?

Just so, I said bravely, touching with tenderness the crease in my pajama leg. Esther likes to iron my pajamas, it relaxes her. Utter nonsense, I said with a fatherly rumble. And furthermore, I said, to nettle him, You sound like a schoolgirl, all these theatrics about killing yourself. Please. Get yourself some grit. If you want to kill yourself, Aaron, you are free to do so. But prior to that you must not blame us. It is too late for these complaints. You are an adult now. Your life is a gift to do with as you choose. Such blame as you enjoy directing at me, at your mother and me, no — it is baseless, and I cannot accept it. We are two mild people, your mother and I, who love you dearly. For true villains, Aaron, you must look elsewhere.

I was frightened out of my wits, saying these terrible condemning words. But the sentences came out of me as if I meant them.

You’ve done it this time, he said. You’ve done it this time, there’s no going back… Gently, my broken heart thumping, I hung up the phone, laying the receiver in its cradle.

I entrusted his life and his soul to God at that moment, placing my son in His hands, this God in whom I do not believe.

AND KIERKEGAARD? Kierkegaard himself says that the gods created humankind and its troubles simply because they were bored.

SIXTEEN

WITHIN A MONTH after our return to Ann Arbor, we were talking about a divorce. Diana lived with me for a while, a few desultory months, and then, once she had the renters removed from her house, she moved out of here and back in there. She took the stone child she bought in the Upper Peninsula and put it in her back yard. Snow fell on that child all winter long; drifts blew up against it, and gradually it disappeared into the snow. She also salvaged the pictures I had drawn of herself on the back of the dragon. Those she saved. That dragon erased the two of us.

That’s all I’m going to say about the subject for now. As Chloé says, some things don’t bear much looking into. If you want something to read, then read the white space on the rest of this page. That’s me, down there in the white.

SEVENTEEN

I COULDN’T GET Mrs. Maggaroulian out of my head. I’d be sleeping, and there she’d be in my dreams, pulling up a chair for an intimate girl-to-girl chat. Her wig’d be edging down toward her forehead and her nail polish would sort of be flaking off. I mean, she looked like a human pawn shop, Mrs. Maggaroulian did, but she never was one for appearances anyway. The whole point of Mrs. M as a person was inner truth. The outer Mrs. Maggaroulian was a horse that somebody should have let out to pasture years ago; you could see she didn’t even have a game plan for contemporary life. She was post-makeover and just about post-human. You could have, like, set her on fire, and I don’t think she’d even have noticed or minded.

But in my head and my dreams, she made sense. She talked to me about Oscar and myself, us as a couple, and she told me to get my marriage license signed immediately, because time was running out on the two of us. She said we had to get married right away on account of our personal eternity was contracting rapidly into a space the size of a dime. We had just about no eternity left, Mrs. Maggaroulian told me. If we weren’t careful, we would be forcibly tossed out of a time window. She couldn’t elaborate. She went on about how you can’t name names in dreams. She had all these disclaimers, how she knew everything there was to know but only had an operator’s permit from the universe to tell me a tiny percentage of it before I woke up.

I told Oscar some of this. I trusted him.

She was a soul-antique, Mrs. Maggaroulian. You could see that she believed in marriage by the way she talked about it. A sacrament, she quoted from somewhere, rubbing her big hands together. Mrs. Maggaroulian talking about marriage was weird. It was kind of like a dog talking about being the mayor of Cleveland. But if the dog does it long enough, talking on and on about the difficulties and the responsibilities of being mayor and how he has to keep track of everything and not slip up, you start to believe him. Well, she could have called it — what Oscar and I had — anything she wanted to, because, as you know, we were getting married. Mrs. Maggaroulian was telling me what I already knew. I mean, I knew we were holy and would only become more so. She was just saying to get holier in a hurry, to put it on the fast track.

JANEY, MY FRIEND the video artist, called me and said she wanted to have coffee, so I met her at a rival caffeine establishment, Goodbye Blue Monday, that was more downtown Ann Arbor than we were at Jitters, out there at the mall. They had GBM decorated to look Eurochic, with posters on the wall of people wearing berets and Woody Allen in French and all that other Parisian high life everywhere. Janey was sitting at a back table reading the current issue of Bust magazine. She was all grown up but you could see where her pimples had once been when you approached her. When she smiled at me, it was wolfish. Untamed, though not in the good way. She had brown hair like a wolf. Some girls, it almost doesn’t matter if they wash their hair or not. Shampoo won’t help these ladies. I can be a bitch, I got to watch that tendency.

You just knew from the radar that she was a woman who dug other women physically but wouldn’t do anything about it, and she had spent her young life hemming and hawing, lighting cigarettes and putting them out in frustration. She had an inventory of failed gestures. Being modern, I’d slept with other girls once or twice myself but that was all over now that Oscar loved me and we’d have a life together. Janey, she was pretty in a predatory way, like that pianist, Liberace, but without the clothes he wore to keep you confused and off the scent. She just wore jeans and tee-shirts, like me. You could see by peering at her why she wanted to film porn all day. She stared with these dead-fish eyes at whatever was swimming by her. She was a hungry ghost, sucking people up in her karmic vacuum cleaner and storing them in the dustbag. Also, she chewed her fingernails. I hate that. Still, we were friends, maybe out of convenience or something.

Anyway, she was sitting there with the videotape on the table. She gave me a sort of bored wave of hello, like I was already a disappointment to her before our first words had been spoken, very Hollywood agent, and she flipped her head back with this girl-of-the-world shake, accompanied by her patented wolf smile, which looks better on guys than it does on her. “Hey, Barlow,” she said. Barlow is my last name. “Whassup?”

“Not much,” I said. “How ’bout you?”

She shook one of her hands like there was water on it. “Do you ever get bored with weather? The weather is so sobering around here.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I pretended to smile, which came out as a real smile. “I’m going to move to Seattle or somewhere where they have some goddamn actual weather. You know: real rain? Rain and heroin. As opposed to what we get here? Oh, and guess what. I’m discovering something,” she said, sipping her cappuccino. “Guess what I discovered.”

I leaned back. “No idea.”

“Try to guess.”

“Janey, I gotta be at work in a coupla hours. I don’t have time to guess.” She was staring at me like she wanted to dine out on me, and she flashed me a quick thing, an event-horizon thing lowering and happening on her face, and then it was gone, and she was normal again. “Why don’t you just tell me?”

“Okay,” she said. “The video we made? The one with you and Oscar, that I shot and directed? We’re not going to make any serious money out of it. In fact,” she said, “we’re not going to make any money at all, almost.”

“Like how much?”

She leaned back. “Like almost nothing. Like zilch.”

“Jeez.” I felt that punch in your arm you feel when you’re disappointed. I hadn’t minded Janey taping us doing our mating dance because I figured we’d get enough for a deposit on a better apartment. Besides, you could tell straight sex just bored her silly, when it was happening in front of her, and she wasn’t paying attention, except technically. “I was expecting a lot more,” I said. “Considering how easy it was, doing it.”

“Well it just goes to show. I guess it’s harder to break into the sex industry than I thought. They’re sort of going for the details, those guys. People are bored with what we served up. They want exotica. They didn’t say anything about exotica in the ad. But get this. They said the video was too dull. I have to tell you, I was offended. I mean, hey, I worked on that video. I put a lotta effort into it.”

“How do you mean? Dull?” Suddenly my pride got up. Oscar and me, dull? In bed? No way.

“They called me.” She leaned her head back and her eyes went up just like a shark after a bite of leg and shoe. “They said they could maybe, maybe, use a few minutes of it someday in a video anthology devoted to today’s youth. They said the marketing would be tough, though. There’s no target audience for watching people like you and Oscar. The only thing they liked was Oscar’s skull tattoo and the ‘Die’ underneath it. They said the sex was too midwestern. And they said the setting was bad. Unimaginative. I asked them what was bad about it, and they said it was just a bedroom somewhere. When I asked them where it was supposed to be, they said, well, someplace different, like an office at a used-car lot.” She thrummed her fingers on the table. “And no offense, Chloé, but they said you were pretty but not voluptuous. What do they expect? And they said that the costumes you and Oscar were wearing weren’t any good. They were very critical, these people.”

“What do you mean, the sex was too midwestern? And what was wrong with the costumes?”

“Well, like I told you, they said it wasn’t exotic enough. Like, track star and cheerleader aren’t exotic? But they said they weren’t. Your bodies were okay but nothing special. You took your shoes off. That’s a no-no. What’s the big deal with feet? Anyway, you’re supposed to keep your shoes on. And they claimed you guys didn’t have a ‘look.’ Hey, I argued with them. Chloé, I really did. I defended you. And they said there were other problems.”

“Like?”

“The love thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“They said that it looked like you and Oscar were in love.”

“So?”

“They said the love thing makes the video off-putting. That was the word the guy used. ‘Off-putting.’ It wrecks it visually. That you can just tell by watching. It kinda takes the kick out of it. It makes it creepy to watch. The way you two look at each other was alienating, like you had a thing going. And he really had a deal about the way you went at it. Creepy, he said, too plain-style and also too midwestern. Can you imagine? Fuckin’ mondo. This guy on the phone, working for who he works for, tellin’ me about creepy? I got a little indignant. He blamed the pacing on me, as the director. He said it would a better video if you guys had used your imaginations.”

“No way.”

“That’s what I figured. Well, he was one mean guy, and I guess the result is, I’m not going to make my fortune with you and Oscar.” She poked down at a bag. “Here’s your videocam back. I’m getting another one.”

“What about the money?”

“What about it?”

“You mentioned a figure.”

“First I have to sign an agreement. Then he said the check would be in the mail. It’s not here yet.”

“He said that?”

“Those,” she said in a kind of weird half-whisper, “were his exact words.”

“So you haven’t got the money?”

“Chloé, would I lie to you?” She pouted for a split second.

“I don’t know. I guess not.” It occurred to me just then that Janey hadn’t talked to anybody, that she had made the tape for herself.

“There’s this other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“I’ve been asking around town. I made a few inquiries. I found someone. You wouldn’t believe some of the people I talked to. But I guess the Midwest is like anywhere else. I know someone here in town who’ll pay you and Oscar a lotta money if you do something. I brokered it, so I’d have to get fifty dollars out of that.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s pretty, uh, slight. All you and Oscar have to do is make love to each other. You can do that, for sure. All you have to do is sex, and all you need is love.” She looked disgusted.

“Yeah.”

“There’s a catch.”

“What’s the catch?”

“Well, this person here in town wants to watch.”

“Watch us?”

“Yeah, I guess. You know, he’ll be there in the room, sitting on a chair, watching you. That’s all. It’s not exactly what you’d call a job, Chloé. I mean, it isn’t work. You just make love and then you get paid.”

I got instantly depressed. Ordinarily I have high spirits. This scene was getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, like an event out of somebody else’s life that you don’t even want to hear about in a story. What had happened to how holy we were, Oscar and me? I had fallen low, I could see that, thanks to economics, the hunger for money in a hurry, and I was worried about dragging Oscar down with me. Thinking about foyers can corrupt you, I guess. “Janey,” I said, “did you ever think when we were in fifth grade that we’d be having this conversation?”

“I didn’t think we’d be having this conversation last week.”

“So who is this guy?”

“I don’t know. Just some ordinary horrible guy I met. He’s harmless. Some typical man with eyes. The world is full of them.”

“Is it safe?”

“Sure. Nothing’ll happen. This guy is all middle-aged and bald and a wimp and a loser. Besides, honey, Oscar — well, I’ve seen him naked, right? That boyfriend of yours is strong. He may have done drugs once, but he can sure handle himself. I mean, he looks like a tough motherfucker.” She stopped to sigh admiringly. “Though I know how sweet he is and everything.” She reached around and scratched her back and looked annoyed, like I should be doing it for her, the scratching.

“That money,” I said. “How much was it? I want to get this right.”

She named the sum, and then she said, “Maybe I can get it higher, but I doubt it. It’s already a huge lot.”

“Well, I’ll ask Oscar. But I don’t think so. I really don’t think so.” I waited. “I mean, we’re broke, and we could use the money and everything…”

“Well, it’s like being sex workers for one night. One night only. Putting on a show for a lonely guy. Hey, I hear you guys are getting married. Wow. You’re so traditional.”

“You heard that?”

“Yeah, word gets out. Congratulations.” She started to shake my hand, thought better of it, and stopped in midair.

“Thanks. We’re gonna do it in a week or two.”

“Where?”

“Well, my boss, this guy, Bradley Smith, he’s offered us his back yard for the reception.”

“Who’s going to perform it? Like, the minister?”

“We’re going down to city hall first. You know: the clerk. The clerk does it.”

“Hey,” she said, “you remember that guy, Buddy Preston, from school?” I nodded. “Well, he’s made himself into one of those ministers you become if you send in a matchbook application and twenty dollars. He could marry you, and it’d be legal. He’s married a couple of people lately.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “A couple of people we knew from school. I forget their names. He does it as a sideline. He makes a little money from it. I saw one of his weddings a while ago. It was a real wedding. And he’s a friend of ours. Well, not a friend. But an acquaintance. I mean, you remember him, right? He lives out in Dexter now.”

I gave her a long stare. I was super-irritated. “Do I look zany to you?”

“Well, no.”

“This is my wedding I’m talking about. Jesus, Janey. I want a proper city hall wedding. I don’t want some quack minister. Come on, Janey. Have some respect for my feelings, would you please?”

“Okay, sorry.”

I took a sip of my lemonade. I don’t drink coffee, it’s bad for you. “Oscar and me, we don’t go to church or anything, so we gotta settle for city hall.”

“Let me see your ring.” I showed it to her. I held out my hand in her direction, and she put my hand in her hand. I knew that was the thrill for her, my fingers touching hers, not the ring. “Wow. It’s real pretty. A stone and the whole nine yards. Is that gold? Where’d you get it?”

“I didn’t get it. Oscar got it. He bought it for me.”

“Where’d he get it? Is it, like, an engagement ring?”

“Sort of. It’s a real short engagement, though. He bought it at the jewelry department at the mall. He made a special trip.” I didn’t want it to seem like I was gloating, so I didn’t say anything more about my ring, which had a genuine zirconium diamond in it. It wasn’t glass, if that’s what you’re thinking.

She leaned back and examined the ceiling. “Your parents coming?”

“My parents hate me,” I said. I tried to find what she was looking at on the ceiling but couldn’t. “My dad threw me out, you remember that, back in my party-animal days. They think I’m a loser. Plus my dad is taking orders from my mom about ignoring me. So I’m pretty harsh on them, too, now that the ball’s in my court. What I do is, I exclude them from stuff, such as my wedding.”

“Yeah. You gotta be radical,” she said.

“So anyway, I’ll tell them after the wedding. But they’re not invited. Rhonda, my sister, you remember her? She’s coming. She’ll be at the reception.”

“What about Oscar’s parents?”

“He’s only got one parent. The Bat. Very scary individual. Don’t know if he’s going to show up or not.”

“Am I invited?”

“Well, yeah.” I gave her the time and the address, but you could see she was pissed about not getting a written invitation, of which there weren’t any.

She tried to recover herself by getting girlish. “You guys goin’ on a honeymoon?”

“Yeah. We’re going to a School of Velocity concert the next day and we’ll spend the night in a motel in East Lansing.”

“Chloé, you are so hot. You’re going to be the happening married couple. So what about this guy who wants to watch you two lovebirds fuck?” She was going back to street language, back to business. She smiled at me like she had indigestion and was trying to cover it. “Like all that money?” She named the figure again. “Now there’s a fortune. What about him?”

“It’s way creepy. But, like I say, I’ll ask Oscar.”

THE THING WAS, I wanted to buy Oscar some medical insurance, because Bradley couldn’t afford to give us any benefits at Jitters. And I thought that if we had it, and something happened to Oscar, we’d be covered. But! I knew, alas, that you can’t get an insurance policy for five hundred dollars, but you almost can. What I was worried about also was the pre-existing condition thing, how they never cover that. Well, maybe we could put a deposit on a better apartment.

As for us, I didn’t want anyone watching us ever, exactly. But I also thought: Hey, this customer wants to watch Oscar and me, it’s his problem, right? It’s not our problem. We’re not watching. We’re just doing it the way we always do, being in love and physically endorsing it. Some poor loveless unloved excuse for an American human wants to watch from the bottom of his particular barrel so we can pay for Oscar’s health insurance or a down payment on an apartment, well, hey, there’s a possibility for positive gain here. I guess everybody wants to watch, sort of. Except: you don’t feel like doing it quite so much, maybe you don’t feel like it at all, the air goes out of that particular tire, any of the things you usually do, when somebody’s got their gloating eyes on you.

And then I thought about what sort of man would want to do this. I mean, he had to be pretty desperate, calling up some service somewhere, just because he wanted to watch. I took a walk in Allmendinger Park to think about it. I watched the dogs and the parents and the kids. I imagined him coming home from work, another lonely guy doing the dishes, standing under a lightbulb and listening to the radio, trying not to be a creep but being one anyway, and one night he realizes, bingo, that he’s in hell, he just lives there permanently, hellllooooo, he’s never getting out. The fix is so in, you can’t get more in than that. So what he wants is, he wants to look at what it’s like in heaven, where we are, he wants to see two representatives of the youth culture, which is us, Oscar and me, just lying around and making love, and maybe he could get clarified that way, you know, sitting there, looking at us yelping with happiness the way we do.

It’d be sort of like bringing a dog to a person in an old-age home. Therapeutic. Except you can pat the dog. Us, he wouldn’t be able to touch. I’d insist on that.

Seeing is believing. Seeing is different from telling. I mean, it’s different from me telling you about it, right? Right?

Well, I think so.

But suppose Oscar starts to give me a kiss. When nobody’s watching, he’s, like, doing it for me, and for himself, because he likes to. He likes the way I taste to him. He just breathes me in up here and down there. Would he give me a Slurpee? Maybe not if we were being studied. He’d get shy. But when you’ve got this golf-playing lonely polyester hyper-wimp sitting in a chair watching, this guy who’s bought, excuse me, a fucking ticket, then you’re doing it, like, for him. The whole deal changes. It turns into a show.

That’s not healthy.

THAT NIGHT, WE WERE MAKING hamburgers at the tiny stove, so close to everything that it’s not even in a kitchen, and I told Oscar about it, Janey’s proposal, and you know what he did? He sat there. So I just sat there. Then we both started talking. Eventually he yelled at me and I yelled at him. He and I fought and we ended up crying together, but by the end of the dinner hour we’d decided.

We told each other it wasn’t a big deal.

After all, everybody likes to watch. I mean, I like to watch Oscar, I even like to watch him shave when he’s naked, and he likes to watch me.

We decided to do it. But we wouldn’t go to anyone else’s house, we had to do it here. The guy would have to come in and we would close the door. Those were the conditions. And we did. I called Janey and Janey called him.

THE GUY CAME OVER, just this anonymous middle-aged smallish bald guy with asthma, wearing an old-fashioned gray fedora hat. You could tell his upper lip had been surgically reconstructed. There were flesh fault lines heaving upward from his off-center mouth.

Anyway, this citizen sat on our chair, our furniture — and that was almost the worst part — and we did it for a while, for long enough, anyway. The trouble was, it was an act. And I never felt that Oscar and me were an act before. I couldn’t look back at the guy watching us. I just concentrated on Oscar. I never took my eyes off him. I held on to Oscar like you’d hold on to a lifebuoy that keeps you afloat. At one point his eyes said he couldn’t go on, and my eyes told him he had to, so he did. It was the low point of my life so far.

When we were finished, the guy said he wanted to see us do it again, with some variations.

Oscar sat up in bed. He said okay, sure, in a minute. Then he said he wanted to talk about a movie he’d seen. Did the guy like movies? The guy shrugged. So Oscar said he’d just seen this movie called Cyber Catch or something, and in this movie there’s a vast evil megacomputer that the super-secret government owns that can analyze your DNA from a blood sample. And the computer, the big mainframe, has some people all predicted from here until infinity, their lives laid out and everything based on the DNA, even their afterlives are predicted by the computer before they’re born, in their pre-life. The computer also knows if you’ll go to hell or not, even before you’re born. Your entire post-life is completely mapped out. What it doesn’t get from blood it gets from handwriting samples. The computer wants total control for a consumer society, including the afterlife. The hero and his girlfriend are trying to get at the computer, but the computer knows all about them, so the guy-hero has to think his way into being somebody else in order to defeat the computer, and the girl-hero has to change her identity into, like, this minimum-wage cleaning woman. They’ve got to imagine their escape.

Oscar sat up in bed naked doing this plot summary for about ten minutes. I never knew he could make up stories before that. Then the bald guy with the facial fault lines said, “That’s nice, kid. But if I wanted to go to a movie, I’d go to a movie. Maybe you could do what I’m paying you for, okay?”

“Okay,” Oscar said, and he shrugged his naked shoulder. He turned to me and gave me a peck on the cheek, like the show had to go on.

The second time was harder, that’s all I’ll say. We earned that money. At the end of the show, when we were finished, we got paid. I’d almost never seen so much cash in my life.

I swore off life for a day or two after that. My New Year’s resolution was to bag it.

I won’t even tell you about how I vomited the next day. Or how I got rid of the chair the guy had sat in. My life isn’t sad, I have a good life, so I won’t convey that it’s pathetic or anything. But I did get rid of that chair.

The funny thing was, after all this happened, and before we actually got married, I stopped thinking of myself as a girl. I had thought of myself that way, on and off, up until then. But after that, no. No more girl. The girl was out of me. It didn’t apply. The word sort of made me flinch from then on.

EIGHTEEN

THE LITTLE MARRIAGE EXPERIMENT with Bradley hadn’t worked out, and so here I was, doing a recently divorced debutante show.

It was Saturday. I had drifted into this summer evening party, a back yard gathering with pinprick clouds of gnats disturbing the air, in that space where the other guests were drinking and talking. Farther back, near the garage, a wasp nest was hanging from a maple branch just above the phone lines. I didn’t see any wasps, but the guests were windmilling their hands in front of their faces to keep the gnats away. “Hi, Diana,” they would say, waving as if to say good-bye. The hostess, Lydia, smiled with relief when I came in. I am rarely a disappointing guest. I tend to spice up whatever social gathering I am invited to. I create small harmless scenes.

The weather seemed untroubled. I heard birds crying out, somewhere above us.

These two people, my friends, the hosts, had constructed this back deck a few years ago, parallel gray boards nailed to a frame. Lydia’s taste was for a certain easygoing informality that thrived on summer parties but not winter ones; this marriage, the one with Don, was her third, and all sorts of children and stepchildren and semi-orphans had been dressed up and were serving condiments and hors d’oeuvres. One of them, whose name was Edgar — you don’t expect a small child to be named Edgar — was playing the piano in the den. The windows were open, and the music-beginner’s Mozart — mixed with the sounds of conversation.

People lazed around. They came and went. Coolers full of beer lay open for inspection and slow bluesy jazz arose like candle smoke out of the stereo and was combined near the house with the sound of Edgar’s Mozart, the minuets he was playing. Their house, which was stuffed with scratched-up antiques, was set back far enough away from the street for privacy, and the hedges were littered with kids’ toys, tricycles, and broken plastic battery-operated games. Walking in, you’d see this wreckage, and it was comforting, familial. Then you’d get to the back and note a treehouse falling to pieces close to the nest of wasps. And down there, in the yard, under the wasp nest, the guests had assembled. The invited guests and the more or less invited guests, people like me, our laughter mixing with the sounds of the crickets and the outcasts, the cigarette smokers, huddling in the back corner, grumpily inhaling.

Lydia is a tall, straight-lined woman with curly black hair that sweeps in a tangle down both sides of her face and her neck. She’s not beautiful, exactly, but her eager, smiling intelligence greets you at the doorway, and before very long you’re divulging your small wickednesses to her, and she’s telling you hers, and she takes on the attractiveness of anyone for whom every sub-minor detail is interesting. Interesting events cling to her. She’s a perfect hostess for a party. She’ll just pry the outrageousness out of you for the sake of a story. She wants to hear about everyone, and it’s only later that you remember that you neglected to ask her about herself.

She writes and illustrates children’s books, all of them about a family of goats who are given distinctive individual features like reading glasses, distinctive smirks, uncombed forelocks, and scowls that Lydia has picked up from her two ex-husbands and her own children. I have often wondered what her children thought about finding their own features located in these goats, but I never found the right moment to ask.

The guests were all from Burns Park, a rumpled academic-professional neighborhood, mostly made up of professionally paid know-it-alls, people with opinions and the leisure to express them.

They — we — had a certain party varnish on. Depending on whether I’ve had enough to drink, I usually don’t like ironic friendliness as much as homely glitter. Because it’s the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more a dull shine, like frequently used silverware. We were all presentable enough, but almost no one was making any kind of statement. Out here in Michigan, real style is too difficult to maintain; the styles are all convenient and secondhand. We’re all hand-me-down personalities. But that’s liberating: it frees you up for other matters of greater importance, the great themes, the sordid passions.

I hadn’t planned to come at all. I knew people were going to take a sort of friendly interest in me and my novelty marriage to Bradley and its quick aftermath. I was prepared to be snarly in a provocative and sexy way, provided I could manage my smiling and witty quarrelsomeness within acceptable limits. I didn’t want sympathy. Well, these people were too hip for sympathy anyway. To be honest, I had this image of myself: I was the tree that a drunk driver slides off the road into. The tree doesn’t move. It doesn’t do anything except stand there. It kills the person just by standing there. That would be me. I’ve got my attitude: lethal neutrality and immobility.

“Hi, Diana.” A voice out of the party air.

“Oh, hi.” My voice back to it. A glassy indifferent smile.

“You look so cute in that.”

“Thanks.” I turned to freshen my drink. I said something about the weather.

I had been back in my house, refurnishing it, preparing one of my cases, and thinking about David now and then, just before this party. Bradley, who was a mistake when conjoined with me, did not occupy my thoughts, but David did, and the other preoccupations I had were the probable duration of our affair and his probable attendance at this back yard social. The statue of the little boy reclined in my back yard.

If you’re recently divorced, and you’re a woman, you don’t know what to wear for a while. You put on the pale blue sundress but you don’t like the boniness of your shoulder blades — people will comment on your eating habits or your level of fitness because they’re terrifically eager to know your mood — so you take off the sundress and you put on the jeans, but that’s physically vain and indulgent unless they’re new and the exact right fit, and so you take them off for the simple skirt, but that’s too simple, that and the blouse: it turns you instantly into one of the clueless off-the-racks, hopelessly unstyled and unaccessorized. So what you do is, you put on one of David’s shirts that he left behind, one time, one summer afternoon in your bedroom, escaping in his undershirt from your presence, bloated and mind-numbed from sex, the undershirt with the bookstore logo on it. Then you put on your jeans. You don’t tuck in the shirt, David’s blue denim, you let it hang down. Then you do tuck it in. You wonder if the wife, the ill-named Katrinka, will recognize it. It has started to seem, in your meaner moments, to be an interesting prospect that she might recognize it. She could make a fuss and stage an outcry. That might even be quite wonderful, that prospect. It would enliven the party.

Before the itch started, I made a social effort. I conversed with one doctor and one accountant, one electrical engineer and two remedial educationists, one professor of economics and one landscape gardener, another person who as far as I could tell was gainfully unemployed, very proud about it, too, and one person who had in a former life-phase programmed computers and now, following a personal crisis, contentedly made furniture. I talked to an aging personnel manager who wanted to take up jazz piano. Some of these people were women and some were not.

Then I felt the itch on the sole of my right foot, a poison ivy rash or a mosquito bite. What I wanted to do was to remove my sandal and start clawing. Sometimes my whole body feels that way. When that happens, I can claw at myself anywhere, I turn into a woman-rash, head to foot.

I put down my plate of barbecued ribs and barbecued chicken right there on the green and fuzzy lawn, without somehow noticing that the clouds had formed and rain had begun to fall and then was insistently falling. Soon everyone except for myself had gone inside. There I was. Preoccupied, I took my sandal off to scratch my foot. Intent on my little task, I just dug at it. I love to do that, it’s one of my bad habits when I have an itch. I was sitting behind a tree guarded from public view, near that wasp nest. No one saw me, or so I thought, enthralled with myself as I was, dazed and thoughtless and fugued. That’s why I didn’t notice this lightly damp business from the sky, this airy show of droplets. I wasn’t paying attention. I was under that tree. The party had gone inside, the people and their food and Edgar’s minuets, and I hadn’t noticed, and it had been reciprocal. No one had collared me. I was uncollected.

At that point I was facing away from the house, with my back hunched over, and I had the sensation on my back of a man looking at me. That particular feeling’s like a humming on your skin.

And what I remember next was this guy, David, of course, his arms folded across his chest like a park ranger, bending over me and putting his jacket over my shoulders and saying, “Let’s cover you up. Let’s shelter you.”

“Hi, David.”

“It’s raining, Diana. Didn’t you notice?”

“Apparently not.”

“You don’t pay enough attention to the present conditions.” He looked up at the sky with gentle gloominess. “You never did. You don’t pay attention to the conditions at hand and then you get soaked and someone has to come and clean up the mess you’ve made of yourself. You’re so willful, but in you it isn’t courage, it’s obstinacy. Diana, Diana, Diana.” I noticed that he liked saying my name.

I said, “Ah. I see that I have been explained in full. Where’s your wife, by the way? Where’s Katrinka?”

“Kat? Well, she’s inside, of course, with the other guests.” He looked toward the house. “They sent me out to get you. They said it was raining. And it is, Diana. It is.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” I looked up at the sky and rain fell into my eyes.

“Exactly right. That’s just what I’m saying.” He gave me a sweet look, and my heart crashed in my chest, at least a little. “The weather reports had predicted rain.”

“Well, I was scratching my foot. I think I have poison ivy.”

“Let’s see.” He sat down and lifted my foot. “Ah.” He fingered it. The itchy spot was right under the arch. “Yes, there’s a dermatitis there, all right.” Then he bent over, shielded by the tree trunk, and kissed it, kissed me, right there on the rash. The nerve of him! My lover.

I don’t remember anything else about the party except for a conversation I had twenty minutes later with Katrinka, there in the corner by the upright piano. Having come inside, I had given the jacket back to David, and he had disappeared into the kitchen. Katrinka and I, old acquaintances, were talking about the politics of the local school-board election, and then we were discussing poison ivy (she, too, had it growing at the edge of their yard), and as we held our plates (I had a new plate with new food) and ate, the conversation swerved like a slightly out-of-control automobile toward the proven or unproved benefits of Vitamin E, and all this time, through an act of will so resolute and brave that it can scarcely be imagined, she kept her eyes on my face after having looked, locked on is maybe a better phrase, once, twice, and then a third time, at the denim shirt I was wearing. You could see, from a telltale movement of her eyebrows, that she was struggling to remember the shirt, trying to ascertain if she did remember it, whether she thought or could think that it might be the shirt she suspected it was, her husband’s blue denim shirt, hanging on me two sizes too large. I watched, not without a trace of pity, as a small gauze of sweat broke out on her forehead, tiny spindles of perspiration.

FOUR DAYS LATER, as in a farce, a comic opera, a nighttime TV half-hour comedy written by a committee, David developed poison ivy rashes on the backs of his hands and on his face, near his mouth.

I don’t remember the last time poison ivy was considered a sexually transmitted disease. Actually, it can’t be transmitted from foot to mouth or even from hand to hand. But it was certainly what you might call a catalyst, accidental though its appearance was on him. Anyway, Katrinka had been thinking about my shirt for days and at last deduced that it was David’s — a wife does not forget her husband’s shirts, not a suburban-four-bedroom-home wife like Katrinka. And when she put one and one together, the two they added up to was us, David and Diana, and that was the night when David moved out, and where he moved was over here, his little boys desperately crying and clutching as he walked out the front door. It doesn’t matter the least little bit that you can’t really pass poison ivy back and forth. She thought you could. So they had an opportunistic fight, which resolved matters. Remember the song? It became our song.

You’re gonna need an ocean

Of calamine lotion

Which we daubed on each other with little tender gestures, our first night as an official couple, unclandestine, David miserable and relieved and miserable again and somehow relieved again, not knowing at all what he felt when I kissed him wildly. He stayed awake all night in his joy and misery.

HE HAD ALWAYS LOVED ME and kept that love a secret from me. Every man likes to pretend that he’s in the CIA, a holder of vast dangerous secrets. This is why they suffer so in telling you that they love you. But once he was here, in my bedroom, the truth having come out, he talked about it — the love — openly, wretched as he was after leaving the boys. As I said, he was rigorous about that. I was the person you had to pry open with a crowbar.

By late summer, a month later, this particular evening I’d been out watching him play basketball with this kid Oscar and some other guys at a city park. The men were vocalizing, I have no idea what they were grunting to each other, this guy-yelping, and their shoes were squeaking on the asphalt. Actually I loved that sound. I was lounging on a park bench off to the side, sitting there, studying him. He was just in shorts and shoes. Earlier in the day we’d been doing yard work. I thought he was kind of beautiful. I liked thinking about him. My tastes had changed. My concept of male beauty had altered: he was now the definition of it. He’d lunge for the ball, he’d use his elbows, he’d do his layups. I sat there, just watching. I’d thought of playing and decided not to, for now. I had shorts on, too. I thought my legs might distract him from time to time. My legs were prettier than they’d been a month or so before. Smoother and nicer-looking. I don’t know why. They just were. Oh, actually I do know why: he loved them.

Behind me, the dogs barked at passing fire trucks, and in another section of the park, two softball teams were shouting some sort of encouragement to their batters and pitchers. The sun sank under the horizon.

When it was finally too dark to play, he joined me. I stood up, and Chloé, Oscar’s fiancée, who was sitting on the other bench after jogging around in her Joy Division tee-shirt and whom I had sort of befriended, well, she stood up, too. David came over. David’s skin was so sweaty that his hand slipped out of mine at first. Then he reached for me again. He laced his fingers between mine. I could smell his sweat. It was rank. I wanted to have him immediately. He put his arm around my shoulders. I hitched myself to his waist.

We got into his car and drove back to my place, which was gradually also becoming his. We went into the bedroom and lay down together. He was still wet and as his sweat dried he had a sweet heavy smell, like overripe blueberries. God, I loved that.

When we were naked, finally, we were standing up, and then he had his hands on my breasts and he was kissing me. I felt star-spattered. And I was thinking: he can have every inch of me. Sweet Jesus, he can pick my bones clean.

I told him I loved him. It escaped me, just like that. And he was cool: he pretended I hadn’t said it or that he hadn’t been listening, though he had heard me say it plenty of times before.

Just about then I heard an ice cream truck going by on the street, the Good Humor Man. With those distant prerecorded bell chimes. They’re supposed to sound cheery, but they sound unearthly and preoccupied, like death’s angel.

And then we were making love, calmer than we usually do it, and I’m looking at David, and my soul — I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s what happened — became visible to me. My soul was a large and not particularly attractive waiting room, just like in a Victorian train station with people going in and out. In this waiting room were feelings I hadn’t known I had, discarded feelings, feelings with nowhere to go, no ticket to a destination. It turned out that I was larger than I had known myself to be; there were multitudes of feelings in there. This can happen any sort of way. I don’t care if you disapprove of what I’m telling you or the means I used to discover it. I warned you: I’m not an original. But at that point I felt like one. I’m just telling you how it happened with me. I was a different person than I had planned to be. My soul was not particularly attractive, but the surprise was that it was there, that I had one.

I loved him and we fused together. He didn’t save me from anything. I was the same person I always was. But as they say: one phase of my life was over, and another one began.

NINETEEN

FOLLOWING THE DIANA marriage incident, Bradley the dog took over my affairs. He urged me onward to take walks with him, eat regularly, and make noises at strangers. This did not include Harry and Esther Ginsberg, who came by from time to time with baked foods of various sorts, and who informed me that the cause of my divorce was not actually myself, or my happenstantial faults, but the house I lived in. At first I thought they meant this metaphorically, but no: the reference was to the physical enclosure, the walls and windows and ceilings. They claimed there was a dybbuk living in it. I had never heard of such a thing, and they refused to explain, claiming that to speak of the thing itself was, like the uttering of the unutterable name of the divinity, bad luck. I checked it in the American Heritage Dictionary and couldn’t believe what I found there. He was a philosopher and she was a scientist, and they were both alleging that Diana and I had been done in by some sort of Jewish phantom.

Well, they’re my neighbors, and I suppose they mean well. I listened to them talk about their son Aaron, and they listened to me talk about Diana. Let them have their dybbuk. Or, excuse me, my dybbuk. After all, I had heard Chloé and Oscar yelping with love cries in my house long after they had been there, house-sitting. I had felt the breath of themselves, the memory of their bodies crisscrossing down the hallways. Who was I to scoff at a dybbuk?

LATE IN THE SUMMER I was walking around town with Bradley. I wasn’t feeling too bad. This song, “My Funny Valentine,” as sung by Ella Fitzgerald, was going through my head as I walked. I always liked her; I liked it that she sang jazz while wearing glasses. I came to the park. There was just enough light to see by, Magritte light. These guys were playing basketball, as usual, including Oscar. Chloé was jogging around the park, wearing her Joy Division tee-shirt and keeping a distant eye on her beloved. And there next to the basketball hoops was a bench, and on this bench sat of all people my ex-wife, Diana. Of course I knew she hadn’t moved out of town. She still occasionally showed up at Jitters, just to say hello and to have coffee. She had changed her hair color. It looked as if it had been dipped in blond ink or something. She looked nice. She was resting on the bench with her arms crossed just under her breasts. I watched her — I was some distance back, on the other side of the street, in the shadows — as she slapped at a mosquito. Her legs looked prettier than I remembered.

After ten minutes, it was too dark, and they stopped playing. And this guy, David, came over to where she was, and Diana stood up, and he put his arm around her shoulders, and she put her arm around his waist, and they started walking toward his car, that way, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. It couldn’t have taken more than fifteen seconds for them to get to that car. But I’ll remember how they looked all my life.

I’d never seen Diana with that settled contentedness before. It’s funny how you can tell when people are in love.

They passed under one of those streetlights they have near the parking area. Bradley tugged at the leash, but I was not to be moved. And I saw Diana clearly, leaning into this fellow, her head bent to the left so that it was resting on his shoulder, and this insane eventuality happened. I felt this punch in my stomach. Standing there, across the street, in the shadows where it was possibly my fate to live, forever after, I felt this punch in my stomach.

I could see instantly what I was missing. That she was beautiful in a way I hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly I missed her lazy manner of reading the editorial pages aloud on Sunday morning and I missed the way she said good night by whispering it in my direction and I missed everything about her, including how mean she could sometimes be. I remembered the way she blew the bangs away from her forehead by jutting her lower lip outward and blowing a stream of air, perfected by her years of playing the oboe in high school, upward. Sick with memory, I was in love with Diana, genuinely, still, or maybe for the first time, at least this way.

They got in the car and now she put her hand on his chest and started kissing him. They kissed for a while. I should have turned away. I tried.

A fire truck went by a few blocks away, howling. Chloé came and collected Oscar and they went home together in Oscar’s beat-up Matador.

I staggered home and couldn’t sleep. It occurred to me for the first time that I had smashed my life with a hammer.

THE JOB AT JITTERS became a different job.

Couples, plain-style Americans, would come in, hand in hand, arm in arm, treating each other as delicacies. They’d order a pound of coffee or they’d order decaf cappuccino, and they’d sit down at a table and talk, leaning toward each other, their secretive knees slowly but ever-so-surely touching. Every day this familiar tableau that I myself had painted in The Feast of Love was presented to me as a done deal, an actuality. In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

The mere sight of happiness made me groan inwardly. Now, when I walked in the parks, all I saw were couples, Chloé and Oscar types of every description. At intersections I would find myself behind couples necking in the backseat, or some woman next to a guy in the front. I would watch. I would see her toying with the back of his neck. Twirling her fingers there. Playing with the little curls. Sometimes I’d see people smiling for no reason. Just smiling, happy with life. This enraged me. I suffered from the happiness of others.

It helps that in Michigan everyone goes inside from November through April. But from May until October they are outside, on display, and all of a sudden if you are single, you have a window to heaven and no way at all to get in.

My attitude toward my art changed. Now I didn’t paint my canvases; instead I vandalized them. Harry Ginsberg came over one evening and said, “I have heard of action painting, but this is new. Bradley, you are at last a pioneer in the visual realm. You are post-action and post-Pop. This, what you are doing, is devastation painting. You are the first painter of the new millennium.”

I was pleased by his comment.

ONE EVENING I LEFT Bradley behind in the house, and I drove to Jackson, Michigan, which is about thirty miles west of Ann Arbor. I had no idea what I would do when I arrived there. It was just a place to go. Jackson is one of those hopeless-case cities that are cited in magazines at the very bottom when they list America’s most livable communities, one of those working-class locales where they’re all repairing cars in the front yard and otherwise having fights and breaking beer bottles over the nearest head. The houses aren’t painted, and the siding is falling off. They’ll kill you for a nickel and steal anything that isn’t nailed down. What can I say? Folks there are enjoying themselves any way they can.

When class warfare erupts in America, as it must within the next decade, it’ll start in Jackson, probably. Those citizens are not being fooled.

Anyway, I found myself driving to Jackson’s one tourist attraction, the Jackson Cascades. This guy named Sparks built it in the 1930s. He was a radio tycoon. He thought Jackson needed some waterfalls, for the view. It needed something. But there weren’t any visible waterfalls except for the ones that Consumers Power had already dammed up. So he built this thing in the central city park. It’s huge, the size of a football field. Water gubbles out at the top, where it’s been pumped, and it flows down these ten or so artificially built cascades, like a display in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas, and you sit in the chairs they have, having paid your four dollars, while computer-controlled lights play over these cascades — it only opens after dark — and the speakers they’ve attached to telephone poles play Mantovani and Neil Diamond and the 101 Strings. This is where I decided to go to collect my thoughts.

The water doesn’t flow during the day. It sits there. Mosquitoes breed in it. At night they hatch and go insane. They go after you.

This was a Tuesday night. I bought my ticket and sat down in a sort of bleacher chair. The management gives you a fly swatter, a little one with Jackson Cascades printed on it, and you’re supposed to swat the mosquitoes with this device. Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” was blaring over these internment-camp speakers, and I was sitting there with my head in my hands wondering what I was doing in Jackson, Michigan. The colors on the water were turning from magenta to a sort of hot pink, and I was having this insight that my parents had let me loose in the world without explaining anything of importance to me.

Down below me were some families, likewise sitting, likewise watching this spectacle but perkier than I was. One child wearing Oshkosh overalls was running in widening circles. He was yelling, “I’m gonna explode!” I nodded at him. Okay with me, kid. You just explode right there. I’m watching, and I’ve got the good view.

The music switched to Mantovani, this string slop, pouring molasses over hapless George Gershwin.

In front of me this picture-perfect high school couple was sitting on a bench. He looked a little bit like the guy that Diana was seeing, and she looked a tiny bit like Diana. The resemblance was close enough to indicate God’s trickster pranksterism. They were talking. Then, God help me, they were kissing. Everywhere I went I saw people kissing. It was this smooch conspiracy. These two were holding hands, and with the hand that was free, she was swatting mosquitoes on his back, and he was swatting mosquitoes on hers.

I found them unbearable. Another couple in love, this time at the Jackson Cascades, swatting mosquitoes off each other’s backs, and they both looked dirt-poor, knowing the system was rigged against them, and they didn’t care because they were both sedated with amour.

Down with love, I thought, and all its theatrics. I felt a sort of energetic, visionary despair.

I raced back toward my car. As I drove home, typically, I was arrested for speeding. I, Mr. Toad, was traveling eighty-five miles an hour on I-94. I was given a breath test. Sober sober sober. Oh, I am a sober man, and the state trooper wrote me a ticket to confirm my sober crime.

Back in Ann Arbor, Bradley greeted me with great joy, which for once was not contagious. I walked into the kitchen and turned on the overhead fluorescent light. It snaps at you when you do that, before it begins to shower glare and that flickering corpse-blue illumination on the sink and the Formica counter and the red dish drainer. For once I believed Harry and Esther; there was indeed a dybbuk living in the house with me. I saw it in the living room. It had the appearance of an easy chair. Demons can disguise themselves cleverly.

I sat down. My head was full of wild ambitious urges to hurt myself. I tasted the ambrosia of maddened impulse. I wanted my interior pain out in my body somehow. I wanted this vague pain to be specific. That’s how I explain it.

I took out my sharpest knife and cut off the very tip of my little finger. On my left hand.

I sat there and bled while my dog whined and barked at me. Then I called my neighbor, Harry Ginsberg, and he drove me in my car down to the hospital. He did not comment or ask questions. He’s a good man. Philosophy has taught him how to keep his mouth shut when necessary. I insisted on taking my car because I knew I would leave bloodstains soaked into the leatherette, and indeed I did: great expressive blotch-stains. At the emergency entrance, Harry dropped me off to park the car. Eventually they put me into a room with this black woman, this doctor, who introduced herself as Dr. Margaret Ntegyereize, and she was the one who bandaged me up. She asked me how I had done such a thing. I explained. She had beautiful eyes, Margaret did, and no wedding ring, and I fell in love with her on the spot. I couldn’t tactfully get her phone number right there but resolved to obtain it by stealth.

Driving me home, Harry told me — how could I not know it? — that Jackson Pollock had cut off the tip of his little finger at the age of seven. Seven! Jesus Christ. Not even my pain is original.

TWENTY

IN THOSE DAYS, before I fell in love with Diana and married her (which was after Bradley had met her, married her, and she left him for me) — before all that, I used to hunt in the forests and marshes up north. Deer, in particular, but ducks also, and pheasants. Now that I’ve lost that passion, I remember my prey with an odd clarity. I see all the individual animals I killed and cleaned and prepared for meals, crossing my line of sight one by one like mechanical birds in a shooting gallery flipping up from one side and sinking down on the other. I see their eyes, small glintings there. Sympathy for these animals? Why should I feel sympathy? That’s for others. They were one form of life, I was another. I was never one of them.

It could be that I didn’t think at all. The cells of my body collectively strained to be outside with a weapon in my hand, in pursuit of them.

Every part of this pursuit made me edgy and alert. I didn’t say to myself: I like to hunt. Liking had nothing to do with it. It was much more simple: I was a hunter, and that simplified my identity. I didn’t really have to consider the matter at all. I hunted the way an apple tree produces apples, as if it was purely second nature. My father had taught me how. I felt his presence there in those woods and fields, the weight of his flesh and bones on my shoulders, the sound of his gruff voice in my ear.

I counted the days until hunting season opened just as other men counted the days on the calendar until baseball or football season began. My hunting clothes were stored in a basement closet, the bright orange for deer hunting, the camouflage for the ducks. I’d go to that particular corner, open the door, yank at the pull chain for the light, and just look at the clothes, hanging there, swaying sometimes in the draft I had brought in, or from the furnace vents, swaying like ghosts dangling on the clothes rack. I’d have a beer in my hand and I would drink the beer as I gazed at the contents of the basement corner, an expression of suspended animation on my face.

I had a succession of girlfriends who tolerated this behavior. Then I had Katrinka. I married her.

I gave it all up when I left her and moved in with Diana, when I left my boys, Carl and Jeremiah, and took up with her. Once Diana belonged to me, and once I had begun to experience what it was like to live with her, and to live without my sons except on weekends, to have lost or at least be separated from my children, I abandoned all my interest in hunting. I took all my guns and my hunting clothes to the dump. I had no intention of selling them or giving them away. I didn’t want them to fall into another man’s hands. I wanted their history to end with me. I loved her, I loved her with some kind of violence, and that was all that mattered.

THERE’S ANOTHER STORY I want to tell you, and then I’ll be finished. I don’t think people should talk about their health, but this story is more about love than medicine. I had gone to the dentist for a routine cleaning. The dental hygienist, a pleasant woman about my age with whom I conversed easily, had just about finished the job when, as she was examining my throat, she said, “Hmm.” She asked me to open wider and to say, “Ah.” I did. She looked. I gazed out the window at the view. She did not say what she was looking at. I stayed calm. She called in the dentist, who also took a long look at me — at my tonsils, it turned out, and the uvula, on which were spots of some sort.

“There’s something there,” she said with maddening nonspecificity. “I don’t think it’s serious, but I’m sending you to a specialist. Just for a look.”

“What do you see?” I asked.

“Probably nothing,” she said. “Probably just a couple of papillomas. Which are like warts, a wart on your throat.” She looked at me carefully. “Really,” she said, “that’s all I think they are.”

She gave me the name of the specialist I was to see, a Dr. Hovhanessian. When I called his office, I discovered that I would have to wait for a month for an appointment. It was August, and Dr. Hov would be on vacation, his secretary told me, so I — and my throat and its contents — would have to bide the time until he returned.

On the day of the appointment, I drove over to the medical complex, checked in at his front desk, and sat in the waiting room reading old copies of Time and Newsweek. Eventually the nurse called my name and ushered me into an examination room that at its center featured a chair like a dentist’s chair. Up on the wall were various posters about deafness and throat cancer. I had thought about throat cancer and about the possible choking or pain that might accompany it, I thought of speaking with an artificial larynx, but the truth is that until that moment I had really done my best to be a man about it and to keep the whole matter out of my mind. I’m quite good at such denials and exclusions.

Bad health is for others. I’m not supposed to get sick.

But in that examination room with that black chair in front of me, my heart began to pound, and because the chair I was sitting in was a simple metal one with stainless steel sleighlike runners resting on the slippery blue-speckled linoleum tile, I found myself moving slowly across the floor, powered by the pounding of my heart against my back. Fear has a certain horsepower, I discovered.

Dr. Hovhanessian eventually arrived. He was an oval-faced man who affected an authoritative air and who presented a general and perhaps inflated aura of competence. We exchanged pleasantries and he was kind enough to show interest in the research work I do for the drug company (I’m a molecular biologist). Then he said, “Let’s have a look at you.”

When the exam was over, he leaned back and said, “You don’t have anything.”

“I don’t have anything?”

“You had your tonsils out once. Those are lymphatic deposits. They’ve been there for years.”

“Oh.” Then I smiled. “I guess that’s a relief.”

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said. Then he rubbed his face. “You know, when I first started to practice medicine, I thought my patients wanted me to give them a clear diagnosis of their illnesses and a clear course of treatment. But that’s wrong. What my patients really want is for me to tell them that nothing is wrong with them and that they’ll be fine and that they’ll live to be a hundred.”

I nodded.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” Dr. Hovhanessian said, “and you’ll be fine. You’ll live for another fifty years, give or take a decade.”

I thanked him and walked out of his office and got into my car. What I didn’t do was drive back to work. Instead I drove along the river for an hour or two and then went into a bar downtown and ordered a double scotch. Instead of making me drunk, the scotch brought me to a higher pitch of lucidity. I made a resolution, the only one I can remember making and keeping. I decided not to tolerate, in my life from then on, any form of trivial unhappiness.

This thing had been a lesson to me. Our time here is short.

That night I told Katrinka that I would be leaving her, and I informed her about Diana. Diana’s story about the denim shirt is her invention. I was the one who initiated all this.

I CAN’T TALK about love directly. I never have been able to. The only way I can talk about it is by talking about hunting and visits to the doctor.

TWENTY-ONE

I’D BEEN AT THE GROCERY BUYING, I don’t know, food, for example orange juice, and a candy bar and ice cream for Oscar, and I had come out to the parking lot to unload all this stuff into the Matador and take it home. That was when I saw, over there in the corner by the dumpster, my future father-in-law, the Bat, leaning against his truck, an open-sewer smile on his face. He was taking his own time, the Bat was. He had his wings folded up but he was calamitizing me with his evil.

I figured that word had finally gotten out to the Bat about Oscar and me getting married. Maybe Oscar had invited him to the reception as what you’d call a friendly gesture.

That must’ve just shoved the Bat’s psyche down to the barroom floor among the peanut shells and the sawdust. His short-fatherhood was obsolete now, he had no necessity for being alive. Nobody wanted him here on Earth. Anyway, explanations aside, his little greaseball head nodded at me directly over the space of the cars in the parking lot. Like, recognition. He hoped! Maybe he thought… shit, why am I saying this? I don’t care what he thought.

I pulled the car out onto Stadium but fuck and alas, there trailing behind me, still at a distance, was the Bat himself, busily hunched over his steering wheel smoking his Camels and drinking his no-brand beer while he kept me in his line of sight. Well, now at last I had a one hundred percent genuine stalker, and not a handsome one like some women get, with a killer smile and Continental manners, but a genuine blue-ribbon humanoid rodent. I turned by the Dairy Queen, hoping to shake him, but his intentions, being impure, were strong. He hung on to me from his distance. I could feel his puny rat’s eyes boring into the back of my neck.

I drove downtown and parked in the police station parking lot. I figured some proximity to the law would give him the willies. Plus you put human refuse next to courts of law and the human refuse will get anxious and crazy, and eventually they will go away. I thought I’d got rid of him. I waited and then I drove over to our apartment.

But when I got there, the Bat had already arrived and was parked across the street, like we had an appointment. I eased the Matador into the parking lot and hefted the grocery bags into my arms and made my way to the front door. I was not about to run away. The ice cream would melt, wasting my hard-earned money.

Oscar was at work. I should mention that now.

I was trying to open the door with my hand, holding all the groceries. From behind me I heard the Bat say, “You want some help?”

“No,” I said, trying to get into the building.

“Hey, maybe you and me could have ourselves some lunch?”

“Well,” I said, “Lunch? I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Or dinner? Not that I need ’em. You been standing against me,” the Bat said, getting closer. There was this odor in the air that preceded him. “You been back in my house.”

“No, I haven’t.” I wasn’t going to get inside of my building in time. I’d have to face him directly.

“You been in my house and you been takin’ my things over here for your own self.”

“No, I haven’t,” I said. I put the grocery bags down on the stoop. He wasn’t going to hurt me in broad daylight. Bats don’t do that. Not here. God, he stank. I could hardly breathe. Evil has got a smell. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

“You been takin’ my things, girl. You could have got you your own things but you took mine and you kept them for yourself. You even took that souvenir glass dish I like. I want the things back, all the valuables that you got your little bitty hands on.”

“What glass dish? I don’t have your things,” I said. “Except Oscar, and he’s not yours.”

“I oughta punish you for your smart mouth,” he said. “Wouldja like that?” He smiled, making a joke. “Some do.”

“No.”

“I been thinkin’ ’bout how I might just manage it. The punishment.” He put his chin in his hand like a demonstration of thinking. “It’d hurt. And you, with them nice pretty features you got there, it’d sure be such a shame and a mess.” He waited in a posture of thoughtfulness. “I’m still pondering it, considering the right and the wrong.” He smiled again, and what an awful sight that was. Demons smile, as a rule, before they force themselves into you. “You showin’ your naked self to me in my house and then stealin’ my son the same breath, and takin’ my valuables, I oughta just cancel your rights right on the spot, missy.”

“What spot would that be?” Maybe I could get him on technicalities.

He looked confused for a microsecond. “Any spot.”

“Like this one?”

“You’re tryin’ to turn me around. All’s I’m sayin’ is, you return what you stole. Meanwhile I’m keepin’ my eyes on you, so’s you don’t take you any more of my belongings and then smile yourself up like the little weaselly piece of tail you are.”

He did this little swivel thing and walked back to his car before I could correct him on his dirty language. It’s sad when youth has to reprimand the elders. I could hear him chuckling to himself. I felt relieved that he wasn’t going to try anything violent on my front stoop. He couldn’t have done anything anyway because that week, being totally in love, I was immortal. Also I was relieved to see evil in such a pure form and to see how stupid it looked. The thing about Oscar’s dad was, he was a moron. God himself could’ve tried to tutor the Bat and He’d’ve gotten absolutely noplace. Still, he was Oscar’s dad, and I was sorry we’d never have cheery Thanksgivings around the turkey, family reunions, photo albums, and suchlike. We’d have this dumbfuck drunk meanness, instead. We’d have forty miles of bad road always stretching out in front of us.

It just amazed me that Oscar had come out the way he had, with a father like that. It just goes to show you how inexact a science genetics is.

I took the groceries upstairs and got the ice cream into the freezer before it melted.

Oscar’d been gone a lot, working at Jitters during the day and taking classes at the Arbogast School of Broadcasting at night. He wasn’t going to do coffee all his life. Oscar was not a loser. He had a future in broadcasting. He would be Radio Man. We both agreed on that. He would practice his glottal thrust in the bathroom where the echo was good. In the shower with me, while I was washing his back or his chest, he’d recite commercials that he had written himself in his broadcast voice. He wrote commercials for products that didn’t exist. He wrote a commercial for a pair of scissors with three blades instead of two. You could efficiently cut two things with it simultaneously. He wrote a commercial for a pocket furnace that you’d carry in your overcoat during the winter. Oscar had many many ideas, several of them amazing.

He made an audition tape for a radio show he wanted to do, a mix of Goth, techno, and progressive rock. I listened to it at home. You’d never guess that it wasn’t already on the air. His DJ name was Bone Barrel. He had a medium-low voice and could sound scary and crucial.

We had to do something, since the sex thing hadn’t been lucrative and had been a morale drain besides. We were starting to map out our future. He would be in radio, and I was going to do something utterly else, only I hadn’t decided what yet. Oscar said I should be in the movies as a screen star, and I did consider it. I figured I was so good at so many things, I could kind of pick and choose. I was beginning to think that maybe I could go into social work. I didn’t mind being in the service sector. Anyway, Bradley had asked me if I wanted to learn bookkeeping so I could keep the books at Jitters. So maybe I would do that. I had many options.

For the next couple of days we didn’t see the Bat. He went back to his cave, I guess. And then it was the day of our wedding.

IT WAS A SUNNY DAY in August, the thirteenth. We dressed casual. Bradley Smith was going to meet us at city hall to be our witness. We wanted him there because he’s like an official adult, and he’d always been ultra-nice to us. Also he was going to have a reception for us that afternoon in his back yard, and we wanted to let him have the honor of being at the ceremony, the authorized witness.

On the way to city hall, I went down on Oscar, right in the Matador, that’s how much I loved him. I started at a red light near that new tellerless bank and finished about a mile and a half later, near a minimart and a dry cleaner. I don’t know if anyone saw me. I don’t think so. Oscar said, “Honey, I’m just amazed.” I believe he was. He just let out a little mew when he came, and then he accelerated accidentally. It was straight from the heart, him and me, whatever we did. I kind of hoped you’d be able to smell his splurge on my breath an hour or so later after I said “I do,” but I don’t know if you can detect that smell conversationally. I didn’t leave any stains on him; I swallowed it all down, neat as a pin as I am, though there wasn’t much to swallow, since for good luck for our marriage we had made copious desperate love about two hours earlier on the floor, before we got dressed. Oscar’s cum tastes like wheat beer with a dash of Clorox, by the way. We were a couple of wild childs, that’s for sure. Everything we did was holy instead of scandalous. You have to trust me on that.

Bradley was there, grinning, at city hall, when we arrived. His left hand was all bandaged up. We went in, and when we came out an hour later — there was another couple waiting, and that slowed us down — with Bradley as our witness, the mayor officiating, Oscar and me were man and wife. Once we were married we kissed, even though it was redundant, the two of us being who we were.

I was Oscar’s wife. In the olden days I would have been Mrs. Oscar Metzger, but since we were living in contemporary times, I was still Chloé Barlow. Anyhow, it was time to celebrate.

WE SET UP THIS BOOM BOX in the boss’s back yard, and a collection of CDs, and he’d taken some tables out there and covered them with food, and over to the side were coolers filled with beer, and jugs and jugs of wine. We would never run out no matter how much we drank or who we invited. I didn’t know why Bradley wanted to do this for us except that we had started as his employees and stuck by him or something. We were Bradley Smith loyalists, Oscar and me, despite our almost minimal wages and the oppression we experienced by having to work hard.

The sun did what it’s done for decades: it shone. First thing I did when I got there was toss my shoes off so I could dance. I wanted to dance on the grass and feel it on my bare feet like an African woman approaching her new husband. I wanted to be that fierce. I took Oscar’s shoes off myself by hand and I started to feed him food by hand from the table including the cake that Bradley had remembered to buy. I would breathe oxygen into him if I had to.

My sister Rhonda was there, and the Vulture, and Janey, taking her videos, and a bunch of my big-haired friends from high school, and a couple of the Spice Girls I used to live with, plus some of Oscar’s friends like Ranger and Spinner and Fats, and a guy whose name was unimaginatively just plain Don. Bradley’s dog, Bradley, was racing around, barking conversationally to everybody and eating the hors d’oeuvres out of your hands. Bradley the human, not the dog, had invited this new woman, this doctor, who was black and amazingly superchic. I was drinking a fair amount, and Ranger had brought a big number that he lit up on the other side of the house, and although I was the new bride, I got high anyway.

Funny stuff happens to me when I get stoned. Two years ago, before I met Oscar, in my wild-girl days, I went to a summer party. Here’s how high I got. At that party I saw Jesus, the real one, also in attendance at the party. Not all that many people have that honor. He was glistening. Glistening! I mean, he looked like an average Joe, but you could tell he wasn’t. This guy, just standing there, waiting around for I don’t know what, was the Son of Man, so-called, and you could tune in on that without asking anybody, it was so obvious. He was dressed in white and was wearing sandals, and He was so beautiful you just wanted to, like, eat him. He had a million watts of candlepower. He didn’t have to introduce himself because his divinity was so blatant. He didn’t stay. He had business to do. He drank some lemonade and then asked for directions. Jesus nodded while I told him where he wanted to go. It wasn’t the Celestial City, just a street address on the west side. He thanked me. And then he left. Jesus was on an errand, if you can believe it. I wished he’d stayed. He’s probably busy all the time. Everyone in the world wants to talk to him constantly, not just the prison population — everybody.

My point is, I saw Jesus once, and I’m still alive, I’m still here. Talk about luck!

I WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL woman there at the wedding party that afternoon. No one could take their eyes off me. I drank and danced and smoked Ranger’s weed and kissed Oscar, and if a man or a woman wanted to dance with me and get high by being near me for a moment or two, okay, but then I’d go back to Oscar. Bradley’s next-door neighbors, Harry and Esther Ginsberg, they dropped by. Harry and I have a lot in common. We’re both interested in philosophy. We compare notes. He asked me to dance, and I did. He’s a gentleman, and sweet, and he’s so smart you can tell thinking bothers him and takes up a great deal of his time. He gave me a little speech while we danced, ordering me to be happy, which I explained I was anyway, and he said, no, I had to be aware that I was happy. I asked him about evil, and he explained. He wanted to waltz, so I waltzed with him. He showed me how, and I picked the moves up right away.

At one point I looked at the street and saw the Bat just standing and watching, but then he vanished. I should have been concerned, but I wasn’t.

Bradley danced with this black doctor, Dr. Ntegyereize, and she was a much better dancer than he was, but she didn’t seem to care. They looked nice together. You got the feeling that all his life, Bradley had been looking around for an emergency-room physician, and at last he found one, and she was beautiful, besides. People who said that Bradley was unmarketable as a boyfriend and husband would just have to eat their words with a fork and spoon from now on.

He had drawn a picture of Oscar and me riding a dragon, and he put this picture up on the back door into his house, so you’d see it in passing when you went in to the bathroom to do your business.

Late in the afternoon a lot of the guests — our relatives and friends — were getting pretty drunk and/or stoned, but that was okay and totally acceptable behavior at a wedding party. I came out of the house from the bathroom, and I looked at this table, the one Bradley had set for us. The light was shining on it in a certain celestial way, blazing blazing, and for a second the table turned into a bonfire, and so did the food and the wine. The party became, like, incandescent, right in front of my eyes, and I heard voices saying my name, Chloé, like the air was saying it, or God saying it, celebrating me. This table in front of me, the party, was so bright you could be blinded by it. It was just like one of Bradley’s paintings, the one of the table he’d put up in the back of Jitters.

Oscar started dancing with me, whispering love-and-sex stuff in my ear, wrapping himself around me (for a sometimes inarticulate boy, he could sure be eloquent, at least about me, when he whispered to me), and I was afraid I’d take my clothes off there and then, in front of everybody, shameless and crazy with love as I was, giving myself to him body and soul on the lawn, so we excused ourselves from the party and got rice thrown on us and we thanked everyone and we remaindered our sweaty selves into the car (I forgot my shoes in Bradley’s yard), but instead of going to the School of Velocity concert and staying at a motel in East Lansing, we went barefoot back to our little apartment, where we did our lovemaking all night long, my legs wrapped around him oh sweet sweet sweet fucking, like happy birds, which is sort of what you should do anyhow, given the circumstances, newlyweds and everything. We were legal now. We fell asleep at sunrise, birds chirping outside, all our limbs intertwined and confused.

“Sweet dreams, girl,” he said to me.

“Sweet dreams,” I said.

I’D HAD MORE HAPPINESS than most people do in a lifetime, so when Oscar died four months later, I wasn’t ready for it, but I tried to be. I was pregnant by then, and I had memorized every inch of Oscar so I’d never forget any particle of him, inside or out. I didn’t think Mrs. Maggaroulian could be wrong about something that big, and she wasn’t.