The Havana Room

One

Begin on the night that my old life ended. Begin on a warm April evening with a rumpled thirty-nine-year-old man stepping out of his cab at Park Avenue and Seventy-seventh. Manhattan steams and rumbles around him. He needs food, he wants sex, he must have sleep, and he'd prefer them in that order. The cab speeds off. The time is 1 a.m., and he looks up at his apartment building with a heavy, encyclopedic exhalation, which in its lung depth and audible huh can be found his whole life- wish and dream, sadness and joy, victory and loss. Yes, his whole life swirls in that one wet breath- as it does in everyone's.

The idea was for him to get home in time for his son's birthday party, as a surprise. Even his wife isn't expecting him. But his plane was delayed leaving San Francisco, circled LaGuardia endlessly, and then the traffic into the city was slow, even at that hour, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway full of bumping badboys in smoked-glass SUVs, off-peak tractor-trailers, limos from hell. Now, planted on the pavement with his suitcase, our man loosens his red silk tie and top shirt button. He's tired of such constriction, though addicted to its rewards. And has he not been rewarded? Why, yes, of course- bonuses and dividends and compound interest and three-for-one splits. And does he not expect many more such rewards- semiannual wifely blow jobs, prompt service at the dry cleaner's, his secretary's unhesitating agreement to do whatever he asks? Yes, how could he not? He's worked for all these things.

He's a successful lawyer, our lawyer. My lawyer. My own lost self. He's been with his firm for fourteen years, made partner long ago. His client list includes a major major bank (run by dragons in suits, minority-owned by the House of Saud, accountable to no one), several real estate developers (testicle-munching madmen), a television network (puppets dangled by puppets), and various high-net-worth individuals (inheritors, connivers, marriage-flippers). He can handle these people. He's a man of brisk phone calls and efficient business lunches and clean paperwork. Dependable, but not a killer. Or rather, apparently not a killer. Not a screamer or a power-drinker or a deal-popper- no doors get blown off when he goes by, the secretaries don't look up. In fact, he should be a little flashier, but probably couldn't quite pull it off. His hair is too thin, his waist one Sunday Times too thick. On the third hand, the world runs on dependable, unflashy people like him and he knows it. People feel comfortable with him. The law firm feels comfortable. So he feels only somewhat uncomfortable, only a bit replaceable. He understands that it's going to be a slow climb. Five years long for every big one up. He sees the middle passage looming, the gray hair, the stiffness in the knees, the cholesterol pills. But not yet, quite. Where the climb ends, he isn't sure, but it probably involves golf and a boat and the urologist, and this is acceptable, almost. If there's a streak of fatalism in him, he keeps it under control. He wishes for many things and knows he'll get only a few. He wishes he were taller, richer, slimmer, and had screwed many more girls before getting married. His wife, Judith, who is five years younger, is quite lovely. He wishes, however, that she was just a little nicer to him. She knows that she's still quite lovely, for a while at least, until- as she has announced many times- she gets her mother's neck. (Will it be a softly bloated horror, or an udder of empty skin? He doesn't know; there's a family history of cosmetic surgery.) Meanwhile, he's been faithful and a good provider and even changed a few diapers when their son was young. Steady- the same guy year in and year out. Judith, however, believes in the reinventability of all things, especially herself, and has cycled through shiatsu, aromatherapy, yoga, Lord knows what. Wanting something, something else. Seems frustrated, even by her own orgasms. Wants, wants more. More what? Don't he and Judith have quite enough? Of course not. But such desire is dangerous. Thus the constant reinvention. He doesn't understand how that can be done; you are who you are, he believes, and that's it.

He'd like to reinvent his paycheck, however. He's paid a lot. But he's worth more. The old senior partners, amused and goatish, padding along the hallways, suck out more money than they bring in. Though he and Judith live in one of those apartment buildings where a silver-haired doorman greets every resident by name, he wishes that he were paid better- eighty percent would do- for Judith wants another child soon. And kids in New York City are expensive, totems of major money. The ability to project a couple of children through infancy, doctors' visits, baby-sitters, private school, music lessons, and summer camps while living in Manhattan requires a constant stream of after-tax cash. It's not just the cost of education and supervision; it's the protection, the cushioning. The city's children were traumatized enough by the World Trade Center attack. They don't need to see all the panhandlers with seeping sores, the crazies and subway-shitters. You hope to keep them segregated and supervised. Not loitering or dawdling or drifting, because to linger along the path home is to invite bad possibilities. The child snatcher, the pervert, the mob of taunting adolescents wielding box cutters. In Manhattan all monsters are proximate, if not by geography, then by imagination.

And the contours of the imagination are changed by money. The units of luxury get larger. And this lawyer, this man, my own man, this hairless ape in a size 44 suit, knows it. You eat what you kill, he tells himself. Kill more and you'll eat more. Another child means a new apartment, a bigger car. And keeping Selma, their baby-sitter, on for a few more years. He's paying Selma $48,000 a year, when you figure in the extras and freebies and vacations. That's $100,000 pretax. More than he made as a first-year lawyer! How amazing he can pay this, how terrible that he must! And Judith is expecting a big, shingled summer place on Nantucket someday, just like her friends have. Fifteen rooms, tennis court, heated gunite pool, koi pond. "You'll do it, I know you will!" she says brightly. He nods in dull acceptance at the years of work necessary; he'll be humpbacked with fatigue. Yes, money, he needs more money. He's making a ton, needs more! The law firm's compensation committee is run by a tightfisted bean counter named Larry Kirmer; our lawyer, a sophisticated man who made the review at Yale, has enjoyed fantasies of savagely beating Kirmer; these scenarios are quite pleasurable for him to indulge, and such indulgence results in his ability to appear cheerful and positive when in Kirmer's company. Kirmer has no idea of the imaginary wounds he's received, the eye-gougings, dropkicks to the groin, secret heart-punctures. But if Kirmer doubled his salary, the fantasies of violence and retribution would disappear. Life would be kinda great.

Now our man steps toward the apartment house admiring the cherry trees under the windows, just past their peak, as is our man himself. Passersby at this late hour notice nothing unusual about him; if he was once sleekly handsome, he is no longer; if he had once been a vigorous twenty-year-old, now he is paunched in the gut, a man who tosses a rubber football to his son, Timothy, on weekends. A man whose wife apparently does not mind that when he suggests that they have sex he uses mock-witty metaphors involving speedboats ("get up on my water skis") or professional basketball ("drive the lane"). Yes, apparently Judith likes his conventional masculinity. It does not cause any rearrangements of her femininity. It is part of Judith's life, her life style, to be honest, which is not quite the same as a sofa or a minivan, but not utterly divisible from them, either. This is the way she prefers it, too, and any danger to their marriage will come not from a challenge to its conventionality- some rogue element, some dark and potent knight- but from her husband's sudden inability to sustain the marriage's predictable comfort. He, for his part, doesn't yet understand such things, which is to say he doesn't really understand his wife. He understands his law firm and his son and the sports page. He is, in fact, very similar to a sofa or a minivan. He has never lost or gained very much. Just dents and unidentified stains. His griefs are thus far minor, his risks utterly safe, his passions unremarkable, his accomplishments incremental and, when measured against his enormous advantages of class and race and sex, more or less obligatory. If he has the capacity for deep astonishment or genuine brutality, it is as yet undiscovered.

Am I too hard on him, is my description cruel and dismissive? Probably. He was, after all, handsome enough, quite well thought of, dependable in word and deed. A real workhorse in the office. A heck of a guy. Right as rain, a straight shooter, a good dude. His waist really wasn't one Sunday Times too thick. He was even reasonably fit. But I am allowed to distort this man, to seek indications of weakness and decay, because it makes his fate easier to explain. And because that man- you know this already- that man was me, Bill Wyeth.

I'd last talked to Judith early that afternoon, telling her I'd see her the next day. It was one of those marital conversations full of irritation and subtext. "Timothy really misses you," she'd told me. "He wishes you were here."

I'd thought about telling her I was taking an earlier flight. But I wanted Timothy's surprise to be hers, too. I'd been away for four days. My boy was turning eight, and he and his friends were set to go bowling, attend a Knicks practice, and eat at a midtown restaurant featuring waiters dressed like aliens. Then, stuffed with stimulation, they'd all sleep over at our apartment that night. And as I opened the door the signs of their wolf-pack activity met me in the hall: a dozen-odd sport shoes scattered over the floor, a spray of coats and hats, a pile of gift bags, then a finer grade of debrisjelly beans, baseball cards, sneaker-flattened candy, removable vampire teeth, balloons, plastic spoons, streamer paper, chocolate cake, even fake rubber fingers oozing fake rubber blood. With children, one learns to read domestic disorder and its patterns like a forensic investigator sifting the wreckage of a plane. Judith, I concluded, had corralled the boys into bed, then skipped cleaning up after them. A shadowed glimpse into our bedroom confirmed my guess; there Judith lay, exhausted in her sleep, her breasts rising and falling. (She hadn't nursed our son much, and they were still "the franchise," I always told her, which both disgusted and pleased her, and which, we both knew- and were to learn again- was exactly correct; at age thirty-four, her breasts still had market value- more, in fact, than either of us had dreamed.)

I gently closed the door- on this, the night my old life was to end- and peered into our son's bedroom, where all nine boys lay huddled and overlapping in their sleeping bags like puppies. Perhaps one sighed or tossed or addressed a professional athlete in intimate dream-whisper. I kept the hall light on in case of bathroom seekers (who can forget the hot shame of pee, the furtive, groin-clutching pajama-shuffle?) and drifted into our new kitchen, which had cost almost $100,000, and picked up stray plates and pieces of shredded paper tablecloth. The multi-colored chaos of the apartment suggested nothing so much as a hurricane passing over a small coastal town, leaving denuded trees and tossed pickups. No wonder Judith was exhausted.

On the new kitchen counter, a kind of grayish Brazilian marble streaked with purple quartz ("It looks- oh, it looks a foot deep!" our designer had moaned at the prospect of further insertions of our money), lay a list, typed by my secretary, of each boy's full name, his parents and/or stepparents and/or nannies, and the numbers of each (offices, home, cell); in addition, the names of certain boys had been annotated by my wife with pickup times, ear infection medication doses, etc. Innocent enough in its intention, the sheet was sociologically revealing. Here were the sons of some of the most prominent fortyish fathers in the city or, in the case of several second marriages, fiftyish fathers, and likely as not their equally prominent mothers. Every day their corporations and banks appeared in the global financial press. Citibank, Pfizer, IBM. This fact hadn't been lost on me from the beginning. Certain boys in our son's class were favorites of his, others not. But the favorites didn't correspond perfectly with the boys in the class whose parents might be cultivated. Perhaps I had suggested a few certain other boys be invited "for fairness." Perhaps? Of course I had.

Judith had just sighed, tallying the added effort and hypocrisy, the cost of arguing with me, the cost of not. "Okay," she'd breathed heavily, knowing my motivations. That was partly why she married me, no? To eat what I killed? Our son, meanwhile, had clapped his hands in excitement. He was a generous kid and so the party went from five to eight other boys. And here was the list of them, blurred by spilled juice, appended with a smear of chocolate icing.

I set it aside and prowled the refrigerator. Some cold pasta, eight-packs of butterscotch pudding for Timothy's school lunches. But nothing ready-to-eat for a hungry man. I called the Thai takeout place two blocks away and ordered up a hot, greasy mess that came in fifteen minutes, the delivery boy smiling as he took the cash tip, and then Bill Wyeth, yours and mine, spent the last minutes of his former life eating dinner, watching the sports scores, opening bills, and checking his e-mail. There was some consolation in all this multitasking and functionality, the servicing of diverse needs at the same time. Some, but not enough.

Bill Wyeth has one other need, so he steals into the bedroom just to check again. But Judith is miles under, her breath faintly foul, her arm flopped out on the sheet like she's just lobbed a hand grenade against his advance. She is not the kind of woman you can wake up in the middle of the night and jump on. Judith needs preparationon-ramps and gradual acceleration. They'd had sex before he left for San Francisco, but that was five nights ago, and he never partakes of the hotel porn, out of fear that it will somehow appear on the law firm's bill. Every click, every selection stored forever, a string of data trailing behind each of us like a spider's filament. He'd been hoping that getting home early might put her in the mood. But no dice. He needs release, a little shot in the dark. He needs some comfort. Just a little. Besides, he'll sleep better, have more energy tomorrow to deal with the work that's piled up in his absence, to deal with Kirmer.

Judith rolls on her back, breasts shifting, letting go her own wet, capacious breath, and he watches her, his hand idly massaging his groin. Is he frustrated? Hard to say. Bill Wyeth has, sexually speaking, reached the Age of Acceptance. He accepts the fact that he is faithful to his wife. He accepts his desire to plunder any number of younger women and a few older ones who cross his path. He accepts that this will not happen. He accepts that it could happen, given sufficient prevarication, rerouting of cash, and subtle adjustment of his schedule. He accepts the fact that his wife has become rather unmotivated in bed-"disinterested" would be clinical yet polite. "Lazy" would be inflammatory but true. He accepts the fact that it might be his fault but that it really might not be, either. He accepts the idea that marriage is the best arrangement for raising children, although it's pretty tough on the parents. He accepts the fact that many, if not most, of the women he desires to plunder are, no doubt, biographically bruised, and that their intriguing neuroses would quickly become tedious, and he accepts the fact that, all things given, Judith is a rather wonderful human being and that he is enormously lucky to be married to her. She is, above all, a devoted mother to their son, still feeling guilty about not nursing, but unconflicted by the outlay of time and energy of mothering. She'd wrecked her career to be a mother, and because she's accepted this, so has he. Also finding his acceptance is the fact that Judith- sweet, loving, busty, good and nervous Judith- has failed to understand exactly what he needs sexually, despite his patient, nonconfrontational description of what that is, and it is not a position or explicit behavior- no, not at all (well, maybe a few behaviors), but rather a kind of emotional largesse on her part, a kind of lingering generosity he has yearned for his whole life it seems and received only rarely. He accepts that she may desire all kinds of lovers who are not him, for it is clear- just walk the streets of New York- that human beings are infinite in their variety. She probably thinks about women, and she definitely goes a little weak around older, powerful men with full heads of white hair, and says she doesn't find black men attractive (but she has said this a few too many times for him to believe it), and anyway, he accepts this, too. Just as he accepts that out there, in the real world, not just the thin stratum of economic frosting where he resides, people are fucking and boffing and sucking and humping, all shapes and sizes, and putting things into each other- dicks, fingers, tongues, hands, fists, toys, vegetables, viruses, etc.- and that often they are made happy by these activities and often not. He accepts that there are women who require their men to be hairless, and men who desire their women to bench-press three hundred pounds. He accepts that a few radical lesbians actually inject themselves with gray-market testosterone even as certain gay men are stealing estrogen pills from their postmenopausal mothers. He accepts the "classical" feminist critique of men, male hegemony, etc. He accepts the "do me" feminist revision of those critiques. He accepts the terror that women feel at the idea of rape- real, mouth-covering, vagina-tearing rape. He accepts his own occasional, always unplugged desire to do so. He accepts that in certain moments in bed with Judith, he gets close to doing it himself. He accepts that this is a lot of baloney. He accepts that sometimes she loves, loves, loves this (his forceful passion! her helplessness!) and other times accepts it dutifully as a necessary chore to be endured, as transcendent as replacing empty toilet-paper rolls. He accepts that the she-males advertised in the back pages of The Village Voice often look better than the women. He accepts that he has wondered what it would be like to give a blow job or get fucked up the ass. He accepts that he will never know. He accepts that each one of us wants, wants so much, yards and miles and continents of affection and sensation and release, and that mostly we do our best to get it and our best not to get it, depending. We deal with disappointment, we sublimate, we masturbate, we accessorize, we fantasize, we sprinkle psychosexual condiments onto our gruel. Yes, he accepts this, he accepts all of it.

And what he accepts most, now anyway, is that his wife is asleep and unavailable, if not unwilling. He's not getting any action, not tonight anyway- and he accepts that, yes, he does.

So, mouth still full of Thai food, nutty and chickeny and hot, he returns to his den and flicks through the cable channels, hoping for some T amp;A. He'll take anything. Television's standards of indecency rise quickly after midnight, the networks desperate to grab anyone not snagged by the Internet's pornucopia. Anything will do. He's not particular. He's generic. He's a minivan, remember! He has a face full of Thai food, grease on his hands and face and shirt, and is sort of nudging himself, who cares if he gets grease on his pants, just to get the feedback loop started, penis-to-head, head-to-penis. He flicks through two dozen channels with genius reflexes, identifying each show's whack-off potential in perhaps a second before moving on- and yes! Here's some kind of spring-break concert, girls in bikinis, dudes in hats spinning turntables, the girls lewdly greased up with suntan lotion, white girls, black girls, dancing around, tits jiggling, fine, this is sufficient, not porn exactly, but sufficient, he'll pay his bills afterward, just get it done with, and he unbuckles his belt, mouth burning a bit from the food, and then- then he hears footsteps in the hall.

"Yeah?" he calls anxiously, pulling out his shirt to cover his groin.

"I'm thirsty."

"Okay," he calls heartily, filled with relief he hasn't been seen.

It's one of the boys, which one he doesn't know, standing in the doorway, blinking sleepily, warmly rumpled in pajamas that recapitulate the uniform of the Jets' starting quarterback.

"I'm Timmy's dad. You want something to drink?"

"Okay. Yes, please."

The old Bill Wyeth now jumps up and hurries to the kitchen to pour the boy some milk. Skim? Regular? He chooses regular, which will be a little heavier in the boy's stomach and perhaps help him sleep better. He hurries back to the hall. The boy is so sleep-slumpy that Bill has to help him hold the glass, greasy from Bill's hands. The boy lifts the glass slowly. The milk is just what he wants. A darling kid, long lashes, hair fuzzed up by his pillow. He swallows the last of the milk, leaving a white mustache over his lip. "Thanks," he says, drifting toward the bedroom. Bill follows, stepping carefully over the other boys, and helps him settle into his sleeping bag, with a few fatherly pats on the back.

Then he retreats to the den, locks the door, finds his dancing sluts on the television, and whacks off- very economically, using the greasy Thai food carton as a receptacle. Then he pays bills for half an hour, also making a donation to an environmental group that's fighting global warming. Oceans on the rise, deserts spreading, apocalypse guaranteed. Having done this, he puts the boy's glass in the dishwasher and tidies up the kitchen. This will please Judith. Always good to please the wife a bit. At one point he is on his knees scraping green bubble gum from the slate floor that the designer insisted was low maintenance. Next he gets a garbage bag and fills it with party debris, bill notices, junk mail, the dual-purpose Thai food carton, and whatever other refuse he can find and drops it all into the building's trash chute. Then he pokes his head into the boys' room again. One of them is snoring thickly, gurgling with a stuffed nose. Then Bill Wyeth undresses and slips into bed next to his wife. The tip of his penis has a dab of residual wetness on it, a tickle, a stickum of memory, as if he and Judith have actually just had sex. He shifts his limbs, he grinds against the sheets, he eases joints and releases breath, he pushes away the work worries that quickly grow frondlike on the walls of sleep. He has done nothing wrong, he is loyal and true. He pays his taxes and doesn't sit in the handicapped seating on the subway. He has earned his rest, and now, dropping into sleep, feels something close to happiness.

Bill Wyeth is safe.

In the morning the boys rushed one by one into the dining room. Judith, up early, had arranged perhaps ten different brands of cereal in the middle of the table.

"Did Wilson get up?" she said after a few minutes.

"He was asleep," answered our son, reading the back of a cereal box.

Judith walked out of the kitchen. I returned my attention to the paper.

"Bill?" came her voice from the hall. "Come here."

I didn't worry until I saw Judith kneeling next to the boy to whom I'd given the milk. She gently rubbed his back, trying to wake him. "Wilson?" she said. "Wilson, sweetie?" She stopped rubbing his back and waited for a reaction, for him to stir. But nothing happened.

"Wilson? We've got breakfast ready," Judith cooed.

"I don't like the way he's just lying there," I said.

"Wilson?" Judith tried again.

I thought the boy's face looked oddly puffy, his fingers pale.

"Wilson? Wilson?" Judith turned to me. "I can't wake him up!"

And neither could I. I knelt down and shook him. He was cold, his head too floppy. "We need an ambulance!"

As Judith raced to the phone, I rolled Wilson to his side, releasing pizza-lumpy vomit from his mouth. One of his eyes, nearly closed, showed only a slit of white; the other studied a poster of the great Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter. The surfaces of both eyes were dry. The boy looked dead. But he couldn't be. I felt hot, stupid, sickish.

My wife returned, closing the door behind her, phone to her ear. "We have a problem," she announced, trying to stay calm, "we need an ambulance… we have an eight-year-old boy who isn't breathing… What? I don't know! We just woke up! No, no, we just woke up, he didn't! Oh, please, come- I don't know how long-" And then our address and phone number. "Please, please hurry!"

"He was fine last night."

The door opened. Timothy poked his head in, eyes panicked. "Mom?"

"I want you to close the door, Timmy."

" Mom."

"Do as I say."

He glanced at me. "The other boys-"

Judith growled, "Close… the door."

He did. He did what his mother told him, and would in the future. Now Judith knelt next to Wilson. "What did you say? He was fine?"

"Yes."

"You checked on all the boys?"

"Wilson woke up."

"What did you do?" Something twisted in Judith's voice.

"I gave him a glass of milk and put him back to bed."

She seemed to be searching around him, lifting up the other boys' sleeping bags and pillows. "Not peanut butter?"

"I gave him milk," I repeated.

Judith shook her head violently, in anger or frustration. "He has a severe peanut allergy, it's this crazy, crazy thing!" She grabbed Wilson's backpack and frantically pulled out underwear adorned by Jets insignias, a fresh shirt, and socks. "His mother made me swear not to give him anything with peanuts in it. Not the tiniest bit. Even molecules. It sets off a chain reaction in his immune system. She had to call the restaurant ahead of time to explain, and he carries a shot just in case." She looked at her watch. "It's too late, it's- I threw away all the peanut butter in the house! I threw away the eggs and the cashews! I looked at all the candy!"

"Judith, I gave him milk."

She unzipped the boy's sleeping bag and pulled it back, finding aplastic case marked EPINEPHRINE INJECTION- FOR USE IN ANAPHYLACTIC EMERGENCY. "It's empty!" she cried. She pulled the sleeping bag open further. Next to the boy's limp hand lay a yellow plastic injector device with a short needle sticking out of it. "There it is!" she said. "He was trying to- he knew… oh, he knew!" Weeping, she bent down to kiss the boy, as if trying to bring him back to life. "Oh God, I promised… I promised his mother-" She looked up and faced me savagely. "Was anything on the glass?"

"Like what?"

"Like peanut butter!"

"No. There was some grease on my fingers from dinner, maybe."

"What did you have for dinner?"

"I ordered in some Thai food, sweetie, it wasn't-"

"Oh God!" Judith stood rapidly, hand to her mouth. She rushed from the room in horror, and as our lives fell away minute by minutethe arriving EMTs, the police, the call to Wilson's parents, the other boys, now traumatized, crying or chattering nervously, the retrieval of the murderous empty glass (the peanut oil still on its lip, still smellable as the intensified essence of peanuts), the arrival of the other parents- as all that we had known about ourselves crumbled into oblivion, I could not help but recall that drink of milk- the cool glass beaded with condensation, the surface of the milk itself curved upward where it clung to the glass, the satisfying incarnation of liquid love, almost tasteable from arm's length, ample and full, safe and clean. Who would have thought it, who would've thought that I, Bill Wyeth, dependable, tax-paying minivan-man, respected partner in a top law firm, would kill an eight-year-old boy with a glass of milk?

Then I recalled that Wilson was one of the boys I'd wanted invited, for his father was Wilson Doan Sr., a managing partner in one of the city's major investment banks, itself one of my firm's largest clients, a company with offices in 126 countries. His boy had choked to death on my ambition- you could see it that way, you really could.

And an hour later Wilson Doan Sr. stood before me in the hallway of New York Hospital, his only son and namesake still and forever dead. He was a large, strange-looking man in a black coat. His wife had rushed into the hospital screaming, and when the aides explained that her son was not in the emergency room, that he was "downstairs now," she'd collapsed to the floor, growling with grief, writhing as hope left her body. Wilson Doan had seen this. Worse still, he had seen me see this. Now, with his wife sedated, he held his hairy fists at his sides, looking at me directly, and I realized I'd shaken his hand once, years ago, at some function- at Parents' Night at our boys' school, perhaps.

"They said you gave him a glass of milk with peanut oil on it."

"Yes," I said, anxious to apologize. "It was a tragic accidentI'm so sorry."

Wilson Doan was a big man, but what was most noticeable about him were his eyes; slightly crooked, one higher and larger than the other, they gave his face a disturbing complexity; half his expression was public and confrontational, the other private and detached in its scrutiny, the smaller eye coldly noncommittal. This was probably the secret of his success.

"We gave your wife absolutely explicit instructions."

"Yes. She followed them."

"And you didn't?"

"I didn't know."

"Why not?"

"Judith didn't tell me."

"Why not?"

"She didn't expect me home."

He said nothing, his eyes upon me, murderous.

"I flew home as a surprise," I added. "To be with my family."

"I see."

He was trying to retain the skin of civility, yet yearned, I could tell, to hit me, to pound and punch me until I was broken or until, years from now, his rage was extinguished. And I wanted him to do it. Yes, I did. I wanted to be released from my guilt; I wanted the intimacy of his hot fists upon me, for in making my pain I would feel his, and he would know this. He could have hit and kicked me for a long time, and I would have taken the beating as a warm rain. Welcomed, purifying.

But that did not happen. Instead we stood there tensely, he hating me, and me fearing his hatred. Two men dressed in clothes identical in quality and style and even point of purchase for all I knew; two men with wives and real estate and reputations and secretaries and ever longer ears and portfolios and aging parents. He knew too much about me, finally, for him to strike. If he struck me, then he struck at himself, or the idea of himself, for we were that interchangeable, and the fate of it, what had befallen us, was reversible in an instant. My son, his greasy glass of milk. He knew he could've done the same thing.

But there was another reason Wilson Doan Sr. didn't attack me then. It wouldn't have been good for him. Construable as an unseemly display. He was a banker, after all. If he was unable to control his emotions in public, what happened in private? People would talk. (They always do.) The Daily News might run an item. And that was bad for business. But his restraint terrified me all the more because I knew that his impulse must have release sometime, somewhere, and that the further away Wilson Doan's reaction was- the more remote and delayed the detonation- the worse it would be for me. Every minute that he hated me without satisfaction would be another minute in which he gathered his resolve and refined his stratagems. No doubt, too, he understood this, staying his hand with a promise to himself that my eventual punishment would far surpass a mere beating.

Which it did.

I wonder now how Wilson Doan proceeded. Was it by malicious forethought or by organic intuition? Or both, an alternation of ambiguous anger resolving into clear moments of joyfully bitter fulfillment? I don't know. I never asked the man. What is clear, though, is that Wilson Doan did destroy me. Piece by piece, pound by pound, dollar by dollar. And in the end, though not much was left, the result was not disproportionate to the intention, for the intention was great, his grief having no bottom.

People find it difficult to be with a man who killed an eight-year-old boy. Who can blame them? Even though they know it was "a freak accident, one in a million," they wonder, why didn't the wife tell him about the peanut allergy? That just "molecules" would do it? Or did she tell him, and he forgot? After all, husbands always forget things like that. Even I started to wonder if Judith had told me. She could have, on the phone to San Francisco. But she didn't. I was almost sure of it. But I was tired, a thousand details in my head. What if she had told me, in an incidental sort of way? She never claimed she'd told me, but what if she herself didn't remember? How could one forget a phrase like "a chain reaction in the immune system"? Didn't everyone know Thai food often contained peanut oil? (From the article on the death of Wilson Doan Jr. in the metro section of the Times: "Several owners of Thai restaurants contacted by a reporter each confirmed that they used peanut oil in many of their dishes, and each stated they would soon include disclaimers on their menus in an attempt to avoid this increasingly prevalent and occasionally serious malady.") Maybe, people thought to themselves, He'd been drinking. That would explain it. Or maybe He and his wife had been fighting. Maybe anything. And why hadn't I heard? After all, the boy was suffocating! He must have made some noise, no? Hadn't I heard it? Maybe they'd been having sex and didn't hear it for that reason. The wife still has a great rack, the men would think silently to themselves, eyes squinting with wolfish savvy. Or maybe I, the killer, was flat on my back with an empty heroin needle hanging out of my arm. (A surprising number of lawyers are addicted to heroin.) Maybe I was tweezering hairs out of my nose and listening to Louis Armstrong- it didn't matter. The death of little Wilson Doan happened on my watch, in loco parentis. I was responsible. Bill Wyeth, you did it. Yes. You're the bad guy. Yes. You did it, you fucker. Yes. Just me and no one else.

And I was sorry, terribly sorry, though that didn't matter, either. I imagined little Wilson Doan's mother staring disconsolately at her breakfast. Toast, cold eggs. She was said to be dangerously depressed. Losing weight and losing touch. A few years into the future, parents would clone their lost children. Society would decide it was acceptable and let them do it. But not yet. Maybe the Doans would have another baby, but even if they had buckets more kids, there'd always be an ache, a shadow. I had only to think of losing Timothy to imagine their agony. I'd wrecked half a dozen lives, I had not read the list of instructions for each boy, I had sought satiation in the form of Thai takeout and dancing babes, I had somehow not been as vigilant as I could have been. This I told myself. You idiot, look what you did. You and your stupid billable hours and retirement accounts and receding gums. You are revealed as a clown- no, a monster-clown. It doesn't matter if absurdity ravished un-likelihood. There are no complete accidents. All effects have causes. You did it. You suggested the boy be invited. You deserve to die instead. But you won't and you can't; you have a family to care for.

Yes, people find it difficult. They don't want you around their own children. They don't want the taint, the stain. The best of them smile blankly and find scheduling conflicts. The worst of them sport a certain anthropological curiosity and examine you for proof of remorse- teeth-gnashing perhaps, a sudden onset of Tourette's syndrome, the eating of glass, a burning tire placed around one's own neck, maybe. But if you are trying to live anything close to a normal day, if you still have responsibilities for such things as buying apples and paying your electric bill and kissing your own boy good night ("Everything's going to be fine, pal, I promise…"), then you are scraping by, dealing as best you can. And they, those scrutinizing the tightness of your tie knot, don't like what they see. They see you sigh and say, "We're just going to have to get through this." They don't like that because it's confusing. It's unpunished. They want to know if there are "legal ramifications." So what if it was an accident, a stray fingernail clipping of God falling in the wrong place? This is America. If you don't get convicted, you do get sued. O. J. Simpson escaped prison- even though he cut off his wife's headbut was successfully sued. They want to know how it's "affecting the marriage." How do you think? I wanted to scream, but didn't. We're dying.

Judith fell away from me almost instantly. She stopped having sex with me, and my idiotic banter about water skis and basketball disappeared like so much else. There was one night a month or so afterward when I felt her turn in her sleep and hold me from behind, like she used to do, her hands wrapped around my chest, and even as I felt a deep balm go through me she stiffened with a sudden inhalation of breath, pulled her hands back to herself, and turned the other way.

I could stand the loss of Judith, perhaps, but I could not stand the loss of my son. He didn't understand why people said bad things about his father. I explained what had happened, but the kids at school called him names, said his dad killed children. Said he was going to the electric chair. "It's not true," Timothy said hotly, repeating the conversation. "It's not true." But his eyes searched mine for some explanation as to how everything would go back to the way it had been before- Please, Daddy, his eyes begged, make it better — and when I couldn't do that, then his faith was diminished. The idea of dad, of father, shrank and curled inside him. He hated me, I knew, for I had destroyed his universe.

Yes, everyone finds it difficult. The school required counseling for Timothy and for us and suggested we seek "an alternative placement." We had to pull him out of the school, because of the tension, and again and again he asked why his friends didn't have him over for play dates anymore. The other families in the apartment house seemed less interested in taking him out to the park with their kids, as if a blond eight-year-old boy might somehow be a menace, might conduct lightning on a clear day. This was unfair, but expectable. We're still superstitious, all of us. Monkey-men clutching magic feathers and sniffing the wind. The secretaries in my firm, usually cackling and amicably rude, spoke to me with formality, especially after the firm kept me out of its biggest deal of the year, a $400 million office building finance-and-rent-back in midtown Manhattan. I lost eye contact with people. My accountant didn't return my calls. The grocery boy examined the bills in his hand as if they were soaked with plague. Our elevator man, who'd carried the EMTs up and the body of the boy down, whistled silently and looked away.

Meanwhile, Wilson Doan Sr. attacked. He was powerful enough at his bank to force a renegotiation of the bank's of-counsel relationship with my firm. Our performance had been excellent, largely, but I made sure to absent myself from the discussion, which occurred in their offices. We sent my colleague, a senior partner named Dan Tuthill. A good guy, Tuthill, a pal. He was perfection in the law firm, self-destruction everywhere else: he ate sludge for lunch (veal, German chocolate cake), went on extramarital dates with hookerish, raccoon-eyed women he met in bars, and always bought stocks at their top. But he was loyal and determined and righteous on my behalf. By prearrangement, he called my office on his cell phone as he was entering the bank's conference room and placed the phone on the table among his papers. I shut my door and put the call on my speakerphone. This is done all the time, by the way. Sometimes the conversation is secretly taped on the other end or transcribed simultaneously. I could hear the room start to fill, the warm-up chatter, the briefcases clicked open. Donuts and bagels on the side. The coffee-stirring of commerce. I realized that Wilson Doan was not in the room. The conversation went smoothly enough without him, though, and the bankers outlined how they would need the firm's assistance in the coming year. There were a couple of staffing issues, half a dozen technology questions, and a few minor grievances. Very typical. Then Amanda Jenks, the bank's negotiator, said, "Our last area of our concern involves Mr. Wyeth."

"Please explain," Dan Tuthill said.

"We feel that Mr. Wyeth presents genuine difficulties."

A long pause. I stared at my speakerphone.

"It's a matter of confidence," she said.

"Mr. Wyeth is an extraordinary lawyer," came the voice of Dan Tuthill. "You yourself have said as much in the past, I believe."

The room was silent.

"He's a hell of a vicious negotiator."

More nothingness.

"This is nuts. We're talking about a good guy."

"The circumstances are unusual, I would agree," said Amanda Jenks.

"Yes, and everybody is genuinely sensitive to that," answered Dan Tuthill.

"It's very problematic."

"Yes, but am I not correct that Mr. Doan is not intimately involved with the day-to-day legal matters of the bank?"

"Mr. Doan is extremely valuable to this bank," Amanda Jenks said evenly. "I think you know that. Let's speak plainly, Dan, okay? We can't conclude this agreement if Mr. Wyeth is involved."

"Involved?"

"On the account, yes."

"Your bank has a successful eighteen-year relationship with this firm, one that includes dozens of personnel on both sides, and you're willing to cancel that because of Bill's presence on the account?"

Amanda Jenks did not reply. Someone coughed, as if to emphasize the silence. "What are you guys billing us?" she finally said. "Twenty, twenty-one million a year?"

Thus did I hear the gunshot of my own execution.

Dan Tuthill then gave a very nice speech, but they wouldn't budge. Later I learned that Wilson Doan and a few of my firm's most senior partners had played a round of golf a week earlier at the Blind Brook Country Club north of the city and whatever needed to be said had been uttered by about the fourth hole so that they could enjoy the game. They hadn't bothered to tell Dan Tuthill, either.

I was taken off the bank account, which cut my hours at the firm by more than a third, but Wilson Doan was not done, not by any means. As predicted, he and his wife filed a $40 million personal injury negligence suit against me. How did they arrive at the sum of $40 million? Certainly we didn't have money anywhere close to that. The suit was handled by Adolphus Clay III, the famous trial lawyer, a balding, droopy-eyed fox who stood before the television cameras and explained that the Doans were not in any way vindictive but were concerned with getting the message "out there" about the dangers of peanut products. "This is their sole motivation," he said. "I assure you."

Clay, it may be remembered, was the man who won a $700 million class-action suit against the cigarette companies, so naturally he had an additional motivation to take this case- as a precursor to another class-action suit against the prepared-food manufacturers who used nut oil in their goods without explicit warnings on the packaging. The day he announced the suit, the stock price of the country's largest peanut oil manufacturer dropped by ten points and the major peanut allergy Web site had an additional 320,000 hits. I had stepped from the safety of my own small private life into the serrating edge of American mass culture. On our first consultation, my lawyer put Clay's chances of winning a large verdict at four out of five, and said that even an unsuccessful defense would cost me perhaps $1 million, with a $100,000 retainer, payable immediately, now, right here, in his hand.

When I reported these details to Judith she nodded and said she was going out to have her hair done.

I was not present when Judith first met Wilson Doan Sr., privately, at her suggestion, for only much later was I told, but I know her well enough to bet that her desire to sleep with him probably began at the funeral, which she attended alone- though dressed rather well, her black silk blouse not as loose as it could have been. Doan was massive in his sorrow, and this would have quietly appealed to her. She would have found an enormous, distinguished man heaving in grief unbearably sexy. And the strange violence in his face surely thrilled her. She met Doan somewhere discreetly and let him know, with a touch on the hand, or perhaps even a frank lowering of herself against his thick wool pants, that she wanted him. For Doan's part, Judith's quivered offering of herself would have been an unexpected pleasure that only improved his fury at me, not diluted it. Men are quite able to separate their lusts from their angers, or to mix them, as necessary.

I do not hate Judith for this. Not so much, anymore. She was doing what she thought was best for Timothy. I think she and Wilson spent parts of six or seven days in one of the smaller hotels on the Upper East Side. Long lunches, lost afternoons. I imagine Judith was quite vigorous in her exertions, quite multiple in her enthusiasms. He was probably a good lover, old Wilson Doan, probably gave my wife a hell of a good fucking, certainly of the weird large-eye/small-eye variety, and that would have rattled her on a whole other level. I have no doubt that Judith surrendered to him completely, abandoned herself to the moment, breasts bouncing, mouth agape, eyes rolling. And why not? Sex gets more explicit as you get older. It has to. The clock is running. I imagine she told him he could put it wherever he pleased. Wilson Doan would not have smiled or joked or been relaxed, for the sex was a way for him to strike at me, and being an intelligent man, he would feel the hatred in his own pleasure.

The danger of the interaction undoubtedly excited Judith beyond her usual capacity, and she would have seen this contrast as further proof of her problems with her husband. Somewhere in the talk afterward she let Doan understand that she was going to divorce me and move away. She is a planner, Judith. She paid for these encounters with our family credit card, not bothering in any way to conceal them from me. But this wasn't quite as cruel as it seems. The human dynamic here is quite complicated, in fact, and you have to hand it to Judith, for she is extremely intelligent when it comes to the human dynamic; by giving herself to Wilson Doan, she allowed him, as I said, a measure of retribution against me, indulged her own anger at me, and even found comfort from her own alienation. But that is not all. She probably wanted to make some sort of symbolic atonement and hoped, too, that sleeping with Doan might soften his wrath. Or perhaps she knew his wrath was coming anyway and wished to get on the other side of it before it fell. Or maybe sleeping with Wilson Doan was, paradoxically, an act of sisterly support of his wife, who, tomahawked by grief after the funeral, had retreated to a very nice room in the psych ward of New York Hospital- the logic being that she, Judith, understood the wife's incapacity and wished to take up some of her wifely duties during her infirmity. Or, quite the opposite, maybe Judith was striking directly at Doan's wife, warning her not to endanger Timothy, lest she risk losing her marriage as well. It may have been any of these things, or a bit of all of them. Yet I think it was something else, too, and in a perverse sort of way, I could have warned Wilson, man to man, that Judith was more than his equal.

By appealing to his lust as well as to his fury, Judith neatly separated Wilson from his rational awareness of what behaviors most supported his civil suit against Mr. and Mrs. William Wyeth and the hope of collecting damages and penalties from their various holdings. As soon as old Wilson slipped his stiff decision-maker into my wife, he lost his lawyer's interest in the claim, his wife's undiluted righteousness, and a jury's potential sympathies. For, of course, Judith had documented. And not just with the credit card and phone records and a couple of friendly, damn near incriminating notes to Wilson not marked PRIVATE sent to his office (duly opened, date-stamped, triplicated, and filed by his secretary, thus becoming the instant legal property of the bank), but also in the particulars: seven pairs of sexy new silk underwear, cut high on the leg, worn only once, or rather afterward, still possessing not only the occasional gray pubic hair of old Wilson Doan but leavings of the same stuff that had helped launch his doomed son: his semen, in dried form, and protected forever and ever in clear Ziploc bags. (So much in life comes down to what happens to the semen, where it ends up- inside, outside, high or low, lost or found.) If Wilson Doan continued his suit, then it might well come out- it definitely would come out- that one of the plaintiffs was banging one of the defendants, which would be very smudgy indeed, and not pleasing to Mrs. Doan or the officers of the bank. Adolphus Clay III, wiser than most and foxier than all, caught wind of his client's afternoon diversions and soon the Doans had quietly dropped their $40 million complaint.

Not yet knowing the reason, however, I thought this development was a victory, a chance to get our old life back.

"Great news!" I said when I came home that night. Judith was kneeling in her bedroom closet. "It's over!"

Judith just smiled blankly, as one does when listening to the terminally ill describe a miracle treatment.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Cleaning out." She dove back into the closet and I watched pumps and flats and running shoes fly over her head. They fell on the bedspread, at the foot of the dresser, across the carpet. I didn't know much about women's shoes, but they looked perfectly good to me.

I'll finish this quickly- if only for my own sake.

Larry Kirmer took me to lunch and told me I'd become "ineffective in the office." He was not wrong, but he was not kind, either. He spoke with the full authority of the firm's executive committee. There would be no leave of absence, no half-time arrangement, no face-saving explanation. I was a partner, but in the end that made no difference. According to the agreement I'd signed long ago, I'd be paid the value of my partnership over a period of seven years. They stretched it out to keep you quiet. If I contended the arrangement, the firm could cease payment. I was to be gone in two weeks, Kirmer concluded, and why don't you take your unused vacation now?

Thus began the sudden stutter of our financial engine. We'd been happily driving a huge domestic V-8 that burned tankloads of American currency- hundreds of thousands a year, fuel efficiency very poor. But who had cared? Who had cared when we'd tossed our extra cash into a new kitchen that we didn't need? My first severance check was in hand, already trickling away, but beyond that exactly no new dollars and cents were being pumped into the engine, and over the next six months I took us down to five miles an hour. Doing nothing, barely breathing, cost thousands of dollars a week. I liquidated the Schwab money market account ($246,745). I stared at the monthly mortgage bill ($8,780), in shock now. The monthly apartment maintenance fee ($3,945) was outright theft. We fired Selma, our baby-sitter, who had remained loyal and true and who kissed Timothy over and over and wept on her way out the door. Private health care coverage was $2,165 a month. I stopped getting haircuts ($62) and shoeshines ($4), I turned off the lights (0.03 cent/ hour), I bought pasta ($5.90/lb.) instead of fish ($13.99/lb.), I reused the disposable razors (twenty for $9.95). Judith fired the piano teacher ($75 per lesson). I canceled the credit cards. The units of luxury got smaller, then disappeared. I ungaraged the car ($585/month). We owed some taxes ($43,876) from the previous year. I had them take away the rented piano ($259/month). I canceled the paper ($48/month) and the cell phone ($69/month). Our hubcaps were stolen and I didn't bother replacing them with the authentic manufacturer's caps ($316) or the cheap Pep Boys version ($48.99). We were going two miles an hour, the needle on empty.

" Are you going to find a job?" Judith finally asked one night.

"Of course."

"No, I really mean it, Bill."

"I will find a job, okay?"

Judith had lost a few pounds, five perhaps. There had been some long, unexplained lunches, and she'd lost a few pounds.

"I understand that you may subconsciously need to do this to yourself, because you feel so bad. But you don't have to do it to us."

My son had taken down his Derek Jeter posters and given them to me, saying I could sell them if I wanted. There's nothing subconscious about any of this, I thought.

"I've contacted twenty-something law firms in the city, Judith. I've been to six search firms, I've been through the alumni directory, I've lunched with everyone I know." But I was damaged goods. The word had gone out. It was in my face, my eyes, my posture. Even though I tried to hide it and wore nice ties and talked about needing "new challenges." When you're desperate they can tell, and they pity you and hire someone else. It's monkey-logic, it's human nature.

"You were Yale Law Review, you were top-drawer!" Judith cried. "What's going to happen?"

"I'm waiting for the bounce," I confessed.

She almost laughed. "The bounce?"

"I won't break," I promised. "I'll bounce."

"When?"

"I don't know." It was the truth.

Judith's voice was nakedly bitter, dismissive. "How far down do you go before you do this bounce thing?"

I didn't answer.

"It's pretty far, isn't it?" she said, her own voice bouncing off the white ceiling.

I thought I knew you, I muttered to myself.

"And what makes this so-called bounce happen, anyway?" she cried. "What do you hit that makes you come back up?"

I loved Timothy. This is what I wanted to say. He had a nice motion with a baseball, he was sloppy eating his cereal, he brushed his teeth haphazardly, he was learning script and made funny errors with his capital K's, he could listen to an entire Yankees game on the radio and tell me how every run scored, he never picked up his towels or his underwear or dirty socks, he donated his allowance to the World Trade Center charity, he got carsick in taxis, he loved Bart Simpson, he practiced holding his breath in the tub, he was a boy. He was a boy I loved, every last molecule, and there had been another boy who was loved just as much, and I had caused his death. The bounce would come when I had forgiven myself as best I could, had earned some fragment of peace, but not before then. That was what I knew, deep in my own lost boy-self, but I could not tell Judith that.

"Listen," I said, "we'll sell the apartment. I'll do whatever I can. You know that. I can work for the government. I'll sell real estate. I'll drive a cab, I'll teach high school. We can move to another city and I'll work as a lawyer there. You know I'll do anything to support this family."

Judith didn't reply. Instead she tilted her head, adjusted her angle of perspective. What she did next scared me. She blinked. She was thinking. Understanding something- if not about me, then about herself. "I don't know, Bill."

"What don't you know?"

"I don't know if I can do this."

I nodded supportively, I thought. "It's a tough time. But we'll make it through."

Judith crossed her arms. "I feel very uncomfortable about everything. We're becoming poor." She waited for me to react. I didn't. "Poor!" she screamed.

"I would say we've dropped down no farther than what's politely called the upper middle class, Judith. I don't think you or I have the first goddamn idea what real poverty is."

"Well, I feel poor."

"That's a perception, not a fact."

"I also don't feel good about us, Bill, I don't feel good about you." Her voice was shrill, fearful. "Because I don't think that you can fix everything. I know how much you blame yourself. But it was a fucking accident! But you believe you have to suffer because of it! That's what's in your head. And I don't want to suffer with you! And I don't want Timmy to have to suffer! Why can't you just shake this off, why can't you just sort of pretend it didn't happen?"

Pretend that Wilson Doan Jr. hadn't died in our son's bedroom? I didn't have an answer. I could only watch Judith's gaze dart around the apartment- as if all we owned were burning before her- and then back at me, her expression furious, her beautiful eyes filled with resolve, even hatred. Yes, she hated me now, and wanted me to know it.

"You're not going to stick around and find out, is that it?"

"I don't think you under-"

"I understand that you're embarrassed by the fact that I'm not making any money right now. I understand that your sense of security has been assaulted-"

"Shattered- fucking shattered, Bill."

"And I understand, Judith, that you have withdrawn all spousal affections until such time as money has returned to your hot little hand."

"Oh, fuck you!"

"Well, that's my point. You won't."

"That's right, and why would I want to?"

"Because you used to like it."

"Yeah, well, I used to do a lot of things and now I do other things," she said, coldly. "And you might as well understand that."

Judith moved out less than a month later, after badgering me into letting her sell the apartment. Yes, she moved out- to San Francisco. We didn't know anyone there, so far as I knew. The giant yellow moving van came while I was out buying coffee, and the two of them left that evening, Timothy holding his empty baseball glove. No fight, no tears, even. As if it wasn't really happening. The real estate agent will be here in the morning, Judith said, everything is taken care of. All you have to do is leave. I nodded dumbly. You'll have to find yourself a place to live, Bill, okay? Her arms were folded in front of her. Lips rigid. Voice firm. You understand why this has to happen. I think she had Timothy on some kind of tranquilizers, because he didn't protest or cry, not at that point anyway, and when they were gone, when they had actually left me, forever and ever, I — well, I fell apart.

I know this is ugly, I know this is sad. If you see a minivan crash off the highway, engine smoking, windshield a bloody mess, rear wheels in the air, you slow down for a good look and then stomp on the gas to get the hell out of there. I do, too. After all, there are so many pleasant entertainments. The sitcoms and the cyberfrolic. It's all great. Go to it if you must. Flick and click and disappear. You won't get that here. This goes somewhere else. This is about waiting for the bounce.

For a time I rented a two-bedroom apartment in one of the anonymous new towers on the West Side of Manhattan, bright and clean and charmless, faced with pink granite- a bakery confection of an apartment building. The real estate agent, a man who carried three cell phones, sensed my aloneness and distraction and announced that the place was "a guaranteed babe magnet, let me tell you." But that didn't interest me so much as the fact that the building seemed far removed from my old circles. No one I knew would imagine that I'd moved to such a place. The apartment, which faced west toward New Jersey, as well as California, where Judith and Timothy now lived, was large enough that Timothy would have his own room, and I duplicated as many of his possessions as I could remember- clothes, shoes, video games, Yankees posters- keeping alive the dream that my boy might soon be sleeping in the bed or flipping through his baseball cards while listening on the radio to Derek Jeter foul off curveballs. But I quickly found that I was unable to step foot into the room, that doing so filled me with dread, as if Timothy himself had perished, the room merely a shrine to his memory.

A few months into my time there, one of the residents, a woman of about forty with bluish lipstick, frowned as I passed through the lobby. "Excuse me?" she called.

"Yes?" I said.

She stared at me, mouth set.

"Something wrong?" I said.

"I don't know," she answered. "I heard something."

"Heard something?"

"About you, yes."

"What did you hear?"

She looked at my feet and at the expanse of floor between us, then back at me. "I heard that you killed a child and got away with it. That there wasn't enough proof to send you to the electric chair." She waited for my response, her hands on her hips, alert to her own bravery. "There are a lot of kids in this building, mine included, so-"

"So you wanted to know."

"Yes. That's right. Someone knew someone who knew you. They didn't tell me the exact connection."

I said nothing.

"Well?" her voice came back, more righteous now.

I took a step toward her so as not to raise my voice.

"Stay there!"

I stopped. "There was a terrible accident," I said.

"That's not what I heard."

"That's what happened. Believe me, I was there."

"I don't believe you. I think there's more to it than that."

I resented this lipsticked woman, whose name I did not know, I hated her nosy instincts, her ferocious willingness to make accusations on the flimsiest of information. She was a dangerous kind of person, but she was also trying to protect her children and the children of other parents, and I doubted that I'd have acted much differently if the tables had been turned. "It was a terrible accident," I repeated. "That's all I can tell you. It destroyed two families."

"It just can not have been that simple."

I started to move on.

"Wait a minute! I think you're going to have to explain yourself to the tenants' association."

"Oh?" I remembered their fliers in the lobby, concerning trash removal and where children's bicycles could be stored. "And what if they don't find my explanation satisfactory?"

"Then I guess you'll have to leave."

"My lease is with the building owners, not with the tenants' association," I noted.

At this the woman gave a tight ratlike smile. She was happy that I'd resisted. It meant that now there was an issue, something to pull at, to get the flesh to tear. "We'll see," she threatened. "We will most definitely see."

A flier appeared on the bulletin board the next day announcing "a meeting of tenants concerned about family safety issues." Two days later, the minutes of that meeting were posted, announcing that "there was unanimous agreement that there is an urgent need to alert building management about issues relating to the character and criminal histories of specific tenants."

This was an inquisition and a witch-hunt and a vampire-chase, conducted in daylight by people who meant well, and it was coming to get me. I donated the entire contents of my apartment- toys, furniture, kitchen things- to the Catholic church ten blocks to the north and moved out.

Yes, I hurriedly moved out, and I also moved down, where I hoped no one would know me, to a small third-story walk-up on Thirty-sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in the garment district. It's a lousy area, one of the city's many pockets of dirty, congested nowhereness, a few blocks from the rump ends of Pennsylvania Station and Macy's. I rather liked its hulking, paint-peeling anonymity. You don't want to go there. It'd be a waste of energy- a neighborhood with no neighbors to speak of, just offset-printing shops squatting in looming ten-floor factories where long fluorescent tubes stay on all night and smoke vents elbow from opaque windows. A place where you can get an industrial sewing machine repaired in an hour, or a greasy breakfast for $1.50. Where tired men push racks of sequined blouses on rolling flat dollies or pile five dozen cellophaned office chairs on the street. At night, there's no interesting decadence, no glammy intrigue, just drifting, muttering shadows, many wandering to and from the Hotel Barbadour around the corner, one of the city's few remaining single-room residences. Sad, unsoaped people- tooth-pickers and flagellomaniacs. Hummers and have-nevers. My building, in the middle of the block, looked out on a parking garage where a tired woman in red pants gave blow jobs from inside her van to the clerks on their lunch hours. When they came out afterward into the sunlight, they paused to tug at their pants, look left and right, then went on. Sometimes the woman's children played outside the van while she was inside. Ninth Avenue provided a Laundromat, a deli, a newspaper shop, and a daily encounter with a big-armed Puerto Rican guy who appeared each morning, always with a White Castle coffee cup and often a black eye, singing off his drunk as he staggered in the sunlight. "I took on the Cubans," he'd cough, "I took on the Haitians. I'ma gonna kill everybody."

Yes, quite a comedown for old Bill Wyeth, someone who'd slept in twenty or thirty of the world's swankiest hotels (the Conrad in Hong Kong, the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, etc.), yes sir, a fellow who'd even been to a White House dinner during the Clinton administration. (The forty-second president himself had come over to me, looming and squinty-eyed, red-nosed, and shaken my hand and said something in his moist, scratchy voice, Good to see you, we 'preciate your support, or some such as the White House staff photographers clicked away, but that was enough for me- as he knew. When the president shook Judith's hand, her ability to speak devolved into breathy, near-coital word-bits: "Yes, oh, I-! Thank you! Yes!" The cameras clicked, as they did with everyone whose hand he shook. The pictures of both of us with the president, grinning like maniacs, arrived in a large, crisp, unsmudged envelope exactly two days later, having been borne aloft on some special private presidential postal service, the return address on the envelope simply THE WHITE HOUSE in raised gray letters. Judith spent $600 having the photos framed and she took the one of her with Bill C. with her to San Francisco, and what happened to the other one, with me, was anyone's guess.)

I don't remember much from my first few weeks in the walk-up on Thirty-sixth Street, and the reason is simple: I discovered a bottle of Judith's old sleeping pills tucked into my running shoes and swallowed three or four of them a day. You don't kill yourself on that, not even close, not that I actually wanted to. The changes are subtle. You float as you sink. You watch television while sleeping. You actually feel your eyes roll back into your head and it is in no way objectionable. You forget to take off your socks before stepping into the bath. At some point I bought a mattress, a table, and a chair from a guy on the street. I ordered Chinese food every twenty hours or so. I didn't mind the cold ginger chicken, the ants. I shaved irregularly, I used a T-shirt as a pillowcase, I read the news backward.

In time the divorce papers came; I signed the red-flagged pages without reading them. No custody, arranged visitation. Our old apartment sold quickly, the money went straight to her lawyer. I didn't care. I thought Judith and Timothy should get every cent possible. My retirement savings, so carefully tended and weeded and worshipped, were subject to the division of property, and perhaps already knowing that I was incapable of labor, I agreed to the complete liquidation of all my accounts, subject, of course, to the resulting penalties and retroactive taxes. And after the division of this sum, I was left with enough money to squeak along for a while, a few years anyway.

This noble destruction of wealth soon proved to have been unnecessary; Judith's sudden and rather expeditious remarriage to a young technology entrepreneur relieved me (sadly, for it might have been a source of dignity) of the obligation of child support. I was left to live off my future. I preferred not to know anything about the new husband, but one day, while flipping through the financial-celebrity magazines at a newsstand, I came upon a portrait of him. It was a shock. The article, titled "Young Wizards on the Verge," explained why his new company was so sought after. It held the patent to some laser-data storage technology I didn't understand. Data storage, the country was obsessed with it, a new way to avoid death. The article included a glossy photo of the new husband. He was young. Surprisingly dopey-looking, even, neck too long, eyes too close together, maybe even a little cross-eyed, but decked out in a good suit that I'm sure Judith selected. The text said he was twenty-eight years old, had three advanced computer engineering degrees. Stanford, Caltech. A kid, almost. Another picture: wide-hipped and duck-footed. If I was a wrecked minivan, then he was a new laundry truck. Somehow Judith had smelled him out from across the country, and teased him with some of the good stuff. A wink and a wet smile and he's stump-staggering toward her on his knees. I hated his youth, his brain that understood obscure, fantastically valuable things. Did she suckle him, I wondered miserably, did she press that geeky, appreciative face into her buoyant breasts knowing that the rest of things would take care of themselves? Knowing he didn't have a hundredth of the danger or poisonous power of Wilson Doan, but not caring, and, for his part, did he feel that deep, peaceful slowing of the pulse, as I had once felt, Judith's large soft nipples touching the roof of my/his mouth, and did he then know, know, that he was home again, parked, garage door down, safe as he had not been since he was two years old, and that this woman, this mother-woman, would take care of him, force these lovely soft things against his face, for him to suck, if only he did what she wished, which was to hand over the money? Well, maybe. Or maybe Judith really loved him.

The joke had one more gruesome laugh. When Judith's new husband took his company public a week later, he was suddenly worth some $852 million, and my obliteration was complete. My knees actually buckledever so subtly- as I read the newspaper article on the way up the stairs to my apartment. You had to shake your head, even smile at the thing! I had been well paid, had worked like a sled dog for that pay, but the pile of security I had amassed for my family had been rendered meaningless, reduced to a rounding error in the new husband's countinghouse.

That Timothy now lacked for nothing- except for his father- and never would, was bitter solace. He was still young enough that he'd be blinded by his new stepfather's supernova of wealth- the nineteen-thousand-square-foot house in Marin County, the skybox seats to the '49ers, the beach house in Hawaii. I, his father, who issued the seed of him from my loins, was reduced to a dead moon in a lost galaxy, a small voice of a shrinking, uncle-like presence. For a time, I wrote him letters and sent him e-mail and small gifts. But these activities seemed to make me cry. Yes, I wept at the loss of my son. My wife, too. Oh, I missed Judith, too, everything about her. Would have taken her back, in a minute, forgiven all. I tried to keep up my end. But Timothy's letters and calls became less frequent. We didn't have much to talk about. I didn't know anything about his school or friends. I think he and his mother were happy. She was successful, Judith. She made the transition. She saved her son, she saved him from me, from what I had done.

Days flicked by, months drifted along. I was silting my way to the bottom. One could rightly ask how it was that I failed to find another job or rebuild my life to some minimal degree. Or even talk to someone. What friends remained suggested that I should move to Seattle or gobble antidepressants or practice exercise regimes banned in China. And as for my loneliness, certainly Manhattan is filled with an abundance of intelligent, forbearing women, some of whom might have been patient with my despair, but I was unequal to the task of finding one. Surely a better man would have resisted, argued, fought, asserted his rights and achievements and responsibilities. But as we always learn too late, the world doesn't care who we used to be, not particularly. My identity proved as removable as one of the tailored suits I used to wear, and I must confess that as I witnessed each piece of my life flutter away- job, marriage, child, home, money, friends, I entertained a perverse curiosity as to what might remain. Certain small lifelong habits, such as cracking my knuckles and double-knotting my shoelaces, gave me unnatural satisfaction, and seemed increasingly important proof that I had in fact come from somewhere and not plummeted out of the sky, wet and blinking and alone, a newborn forty-year-old man.

In time, I got used to life in my damp apartment on West Thirty-sixth Street, miserable as the building was. The place included a living room, a small but newish kitchen, a bedroom perhaps eight feet across, and a small bathroom. I kept the apartment reasonably clean, considering no one visited me. I tended my accounts at a small desk, sat in one small sofa, ate at a simple table with one chair, owned ten or eleven dishes, slept in a single bed. Outside, the hallway carpeting was worn thin like a path through the weeds, the windows hadn't been cleaned in at least a decade, and who knew if the fire escapes actually worked? The super, a retired and kindly Latino man with dozens of keys on his belt, was occasionally seen escorting an exterminator inside or changing lightbulbs in the hallway, but in general he remained in the basement, where he ran an unlicensed air-conditioner repair shop and looked after several young grandchildren. The building housed perhaps fifty souls, and at first I told my fellow neighbors almost nothing about myself, for I regarded my stay as quite temporary. Within a few months, however, I began to study them with more curiosity, to engage in harmless conversations in the hallways and lobby that allowed me to patch together a mental map of the building. It became clear that about a quarter of the building's inhabitants were happy and on the way up- young girls with good office jobs, say, or the thirtyish Pakistani couple who'd soon have enough money to buy a small apartment- while the rest were moving along various angles of descent, each an example of the grotesque nature of normality: the divorced woman of fifty suffering from cancer, abandoned by her children, painfully climbing the stairs to her apartment, her torso shrunken hideously by her disease, her hair so thinned by the chemo that I could see the shimmering curve of her scalp; the ruined day trader who had high-quality pot delivered three times a week; the would-be dancer with bad skin whose inability to get work was gradually pushing her toward prostitution; the manic salesman who ran an illegal oyster-exporting business; the fat man with no visible form of income who waddled out each day with his Pekinese and a red cane, and returned a few hours later clutching a greasy bag of fried chicken in one hand and an X-rated gay video from the shop around the corner in the other; the chain-smoking ex-magazine writer (author of lengthy and once important new journalism features in Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Look, Harper's, McCall's, and the old Life), formerly almost-famous and now in his late sixties, coughing softly all day behind his door as he pounded out wads of filler for obscure sports-junkie Web sites; the Russian couple whose fighting and fucking was indistinguishable; the older Italian woman who lived on the income generated by her late husband's ownership of two New York City taxi medallions, now rented to a Bengali taxi company in Queens, and so on.

Yes, and so on. The mood of the hallways was undifferentiated loneliness, the smell a mixture of air freshener and cigarettes, the sound the chatter of television sitcoms- including the famously popular ones about clever young professionals living in Manhattan apartment buildings. We, the people who stayed, regarded each other warily, for the presence of each other's failure and misery confirmed our own.

Judith sent me a postcard saying that she and Timothy and her husband would be spending the summer and fall in Tuscany, perhaps with a few weeks in Nice when it got hot, and that, if necessary, I could contact her through her attorney. Timothy would have private tutors in each city, she added. I studied the postcard carefully. Judith's lettering was precise and orderly, showing no wild emotional looping up and down, no leftward-slanting overcontrol. I could tell from her handwriting that she'd written the postcard in a mood of upbeat functionality, ticking items off her things-to-do list. Hire house-sitter, pay lawn service, get mail forwarded, drop postcard to sad-sack ex-husband. The happy wife doing happy things.

I slipped down another notch after that. Life, I understood now, was not ever as it seemed; the windowpane of assumption is shattered, the real view revealed, then shattered again. Yes, I slipped a bitnothing dramatic, exactly. I was depixillating, becoming invisible, emptying. I let my health insurance lapse, I forgot to pay my bar association dues, I quit checking my e-mail, skipped the latest movies, met no one for lunch, spoke rarely, forgot what I read, dreamed nothing.

You may live emptily in Manhattan and be well entertained, however. It doesn't matter if you're unemployed and emotionally disoriented. The city- mysterious, indifferent, ever-changing- remains available for inspection. It also helps if you wear good suits from your old job, for people won't bother you and you can slide into places and use the men's room. Yes, it helps to look respectable. Which, absurdly, I did- each day dressed in coat and tie, carrying my briefcase on the way to nowhere. The city doesn't mind if you spend too much time on a park bench or street corner; the city invites you to stand anonymously, windy grit swirling by. The buildings and shadows and faces practically beg you to fall into a walking dream, a speculative fugue. I did not quite become one of those chattering philosophers with matted hair and blackened fingernails but I was patrolling the perimeter of sanity. If you'd passed me on the street you'd have seen a man just standing, clearly in no hurry, making private studies of things that busy people don't have time for. The patterns of taxi movement on the widest avenues. The afternoon strobing of shadow and sunlight on Broadway. The way water moved.

Yes, one rainy November morning it was water that interested me, how it arrived in the city and how it left, having touched the people I no longer knew. The waterways of Manhattan begin as bubbling streams one hundred miles north, and become enormous aqueducts roaring through bedrock ninety feet below street level that divide upward into a jungle of pipes that telescope ever narrower as water is pushed hundreds of feet into the air, captured in rooftop tanks, then released through iron to brass, chromed steel, even gold plate. Water, pure as rain, but for the fluoride added upstream, and maintained at relatively constant upward and downward pressure but certain always to be recaptured by pipes and fall earthward- flushed, emptied, drained, trickling from spigots and immediately mixed with coffee grounds, urine, food parts, hair, menstrual blood, including, I imagined, that of Wilson Doan's wife, toothpaste rinse, dirt, vomit, the cold semen of Wilson Doan himself (were they trying to have another child?), cigarette butts, Adolphus Clay III's salt-and-peppery whiskers, the soap scum left from Larry Kirmer's 5 a.m. prework shower, Dan Tuthill's confettied credit card receipts and other small documents of compromising information, and the skin cells from Selma's sweet but disappointed face. This muddy stew, this broth of humanity, joined the rain when it came in sheets across the glassy facades of the skyscrapers, running down copper roofs, tar paper, asphalt shingles, aluminum gutters, the windows my son used to gaze through, downspouts, gargoyles, granite facing, bricks of every shape and color, marble, brownstone, painted clapboard, vinyl siding, rusting fire escapes, air-conditioning units, including those that had cooled my wife's skin after she'd screwed Wilson Doan, furnace exhaust vents, the vacuum-sealed double-paned windows illuminating my former law firm office (a new partner in there now, on the phone, safe as a man could be), the rain rattling the leaded colored glass of the church windows where young Wilson Doan was mourned, the penthouse cedar decking where his father drank martinis in the summer… down all these, passing rivets, screws, nails, bolts, mortar joints, caulking, television antenna wire, security cameras either swiveling or of fixed position, including the ones outside our former apartment house that recorded the removal of young Wilson's motionless body to an ambulance, the billioned drops of this vertical floodplain carrying leaves, incinerator soot, a dusting of lead and heavy metals, pigeon and rodent matter, paint chips, rust, volumes of dead and dying insects, the whole mingled sedimentary waterfall plummeting back below street level, sewered and forgotten…

… yes, you may do nothing in Manhattan but tramp around in a suit and tie and study the rainfall, but you still need to watch out where the hell you're going. Which, that soggy November day, as I descended the subway steps at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, I didn't do. The sky had broken open, and everywhere the streets were flooded, taxis splashing sidewalks, oily runoff gurgling into storm drains. I'd completed my idiot disguise that morning with an umbrella, a raincoat, and a week-old copy of The Wall Street Journal. But I failed to notice the muddy waterfall pouring over the header above the subway stairs, and when I felt the cold shower upon me- and leapt sideways- I ran headlong into a younger man in a studded leather jacket as he hurried up the stairs.

"Fucking business freak." He squared his shoulders and I noticed the rings in each nostril, the tattooed tiger coiled around his neck.

"Accident," I sputtered. "Sorry."

"I guess you are." He swung his fist, hitting me once in the jaw, squarely and with authority, as if he'd done it many times before. I fell back onto the slippery stairs, holding my mouth.

"You keep running into people, they're going to fuck up your executive shit, man." He glared, then continued up the steps.

I slumped to one knee, then both, pain ricocheting around my head. Finally I steadied myself and looked up. Had anyone seen the assault? A gaggle of teenage Chinese girls swept down the stairs past me, all colored raincoats and gossiping happiness. In the sluicing downfall they barely noticed me. I spat out a broken molar and staggered back upward, tonguing the throbbing place in my jaw and wanting nothing so much as a drink and a dry place to sit down. Any goddamn place would do. Any place where civilization was still intact. My head hurt as much as my jaw. In front of me a group of young businessmen sporting blue umbrellas with identical corporate logos jostled merrily along Sixth Avenue. I followed them, a lurching figure with a hand to his cheek. The men turned at Thirty-third Street, then disappeared through a big door flanked by potted evergreens. EST. 1847, claimed the gold lettering on the glass. It was an old-time Manhattan steakhouse. I'd passed the place a hundred times before, but never gone inside. Now I did, pulling open the heavy door.

And that- the greasy glass of milk, the long fall from grace, the sudden punch to the head- was how I discovered the Havana Room.