The Librarianist

BOB CAME TO READING IN HIS YOUTH. IT WAS THE OLD STORY OF AN isolated child finding solace in the school library while his peers shrieked their joys and agonies up from the playground. Books led Bob to libraries which led to librarians which led to his becoming one. His first librarian was Miss Middleton. She was gentle to the level of docility, and she enjoyed Bob, and so was kind to him. From time to time she would silently cross the room and set a peeled orange on the table beside him, a cup of water. She did not smile, exactly, but she did give Bob the occasional softish sideways grin, which he took as proof of her fondness for him, and it was proof.

He read adventure stories exclusively and with the pure and thorough commitment of the narcotics addict up until the onset of adolescence, at which point he discovered the dependable literary themes of loss, death, heartbreak, and abject alienation. It was in his senior year of high school that Bob began to think of becoming a librarian, a consideration borne by a friendship or kinship with a man named Sandy Anderson, a middle-aged autodidact and closeted homosexual who happened to be the librarian at Bob’s alma mater. Sandy came to know Bob and soon understood the depth of his literary interests; he started sharing obscurer works with Bob, who was glad for the guidance and pleased that he had been singled out as the one granted access to Sandy’s private syllabus.

One day Bob asked, “How did you become a librarian?”

Sandy went back in his mind. “It seems to me I went to school for it, but that might just be a nightmare I once had.” He had a seen-it-all attitude and treated everything under the sun or moon as a joke; sincere declaration of any type was mocked without mercy. At the start of Bob’s interest in what Sandy called librarianism, he refused to answer the earnest young man’s questions directly. “It’s a nice idea, Bob, but as with so many specialty careers, librarianism doesn’t hold up in our society’s real time.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a job whose usefulness has gone away. The language-based life of the mind was a needed thing in the syrup-slow era of our elders, but who has time for it now? There aren’t any metalsmiths anymore, and soon there’ll be no authors, publishers, booksellers — the entire industry will topple into the sea, like Atlantis; and the librarianists will be buried most deeply in the silt.”

But Bob would not be deterred, and Sandy said he couldn’t deny the sickness of enduring desire in Bob’s eyes. At last he brought in a stack of pamphlets, information about schools where he might attain the needed degree. Bob received these with a Christmas morning fervor while Sandy looked on, shaking his head. “You’re breaking my heart. You’re supposed to be out there getting girls you don’t love pregnant.”

“These are just the thing.”

“You should be in a gang, Bob. You should be getting into knife fights.”

Bob brought the pamphlets home to his mother. She touched the top pamphlet with the tip of her index finger and made a questioning face. Bob told her, “I’m going to be a librarian.”

“Are you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Can I ask why?”

“I don’t know. Why not?”

His mother frowned. “I think you’re too young to start asking yourself that question, don’t you?” Bob shrugged and she said, “What I mean is, once you start asking yourself that question, it’s not so easy to stop. And then, before you know how it’s even come to pass, you’ve given it all away.” She looked into Bob’s face as though she were looking around a corner. “Isn’t there something else you’d rather do with your life?”

“Like what?” Bob asked. Here and he had located a respectable position, suited to his interests and strengths, and it didn’t feel like a compromise in any way. What more did his mother expect from him? Sandy Anderson’s apparent dislike of the field was personal and related to his ongoing life-disappointment; but Bob could never understand his mother’s lack of enthusiasm at his career choice.

He graduated high school with an A average and not a close friend, on campus or off. And why? There is such a thing as charisma, which is the ability to inveigle the devotion of others to benefit your personal cause; the inverse of charisma is horribleness, which is the phenomenon of fouling the mood of a room by simply being. Bob was neither one of these, and neither was he set at a midpoint between the extremes. He was to the side, out of the race completely. From an early age he had a gift for invisibility; he was not tormented by his peers because his peers did not see him, his school teachers prone to forgetting and reforgetting his name. He would have been a highly successful bank robber; he could have stood in a hundred line-ups and walked free from every one. Of course, he’d had instances of minor camaraderie, even romance, through his school years; but none of these achieved any definition or meaning to Bob. The truth was that people made him tired.

After high school he went straight into Portland State to study library sciences, not bothering even to pause for summer break. The course was meant to be three years but Bob managed it in under two. He had a particular life fixed in his mind, like a set on a stage waiting for the play to begin; and while he could not ever be mistaken for ambitious, he was steadfastly driven, that the life he’d pictured and hoped for should commence.

The school years were unremarkable, but Bob was contented. His earliest class began at ten o’clock and the house was empty as he roused himself to meet his day. The schoolwork itself was boring, and often impressively boring. One of Bob’s instructors explained that very little of what Bob was being taught would ever be put to use; and indeed, he found that almost none of it ever came up again. This same instructor also told Bob that the reason the degree took as long as it did was to scare off loafers who saw the role of librarian as a soft career; which it both was and wasn’t, he would learn.

Bob graduated with top honors, which afforded him nothing that he could see. He had decided he would not take part in the graduation ceremony but both his mother and Sandy Anderson insisted, and so he was fitted for cap and gown, and then came the day, the event, which took place on a too-tall stage in an outdoor amphitheater on a muggy summer evening in the southwest hills. Bob’s mother and Sandy looked on from the crowd; they’d never met but took to one another at once, leaning in and sharing humorous confidences. After the ceremony Bob’s mother insisted Sandy come along to the celebratory dinner; as Sandy climbed into the front seat of the Chevy, Bob was visited by a premonition of catastrophe.

They went to a seafood restaurant, though Bob didn’t like seafood. Sandy and Bob’s mother drank four martinis each and became chummy in their teasing asides about Bob’s solitude and self-seriousness. “All this time I’ve been living with a librarian and I didn’t even know it,” his mother said. “If only someone would’ve told me when he was born, then it all would have made sense to me. Years of him sitting silently in his bedroom.” When Bob’s mother went to the restroom, Sandy slipped Bob a letter. He said it was a graduation gift, but that Bob mustn’t open it until he was alone.

At midmeal the mood was high, but by the time the dessert course arrived, a gin-born sullenness took hold of Bob’s mother and Sandy both. Bob’s mother was sitting lowly in the booth with her arms crossed; Sandy began making barbed, catty asides to himself, and his typically wry, kind-but-tired eyes became blotted and blurred, as though his thoughts were wicked. The bill came and Bob volunteered to pay it and to his surprise no one made to debate the gesture. Bob lifted his inert mother up from the booth and walked her through the restaurant and across the parking lot to the Chevy. After installing her in the backseat, he got behind the wheel and started the car. Sandy was standing in the headlights, trying and failing to connect the flame of his lighter with the end of his cigarette. Bob rolled down the window and asked him what he was doing and he answered, “I know a place, perfect for us.”

“I have to get her home.”

“Leave her to sleep it off. I don’t think it’ll be the first time she woke up alone in a car. And we’ve got so much to celebrate.” Gesturing toward downtown, he asked, “You want me to get us a cab? I’ll get us a cab. Should I get us a cab?” Bob backed the car up and the headlights jumped away from Sandy. Halfway home Bob’s mother woke up suddenly and completely and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

She sat looking out at the world as they drove along beside it. “Did you think I’d be upset? Give me some credit for having lived a bit, Bob. I mean, look: you can keep the details to yourself, but I say it takes all kinds to make a world, and good luck to the both of you.” The idea that Bob would have any manner of romance with Sandy was so far away from his mind that he didn’t know what his mother was actually saying until the next morning. He corrected her over breakfast, but her hangover was severe, and she obviously didn’t believe what he was saying. In the time between her meeting Sandy and her death, fifteen months later, she occasionally asked how he was. “He’s welcome to come by, you know. Why don’t you invite him to dinner sometime? We had such a laugh at your graduation.” The letter Sandy had given Bob was a passive-aggressive, constantly evasive declaration of what he named a devotion of special friendship but which Bob, for all his inexperience, could see was something carnal, amorous. Bob had no negative impressions of homosexuality, but he didn’t feel the same way Sandy Anderson did, and was at a loss in terms of what his reply should be. Months went by, and no word between them. Bob felt badly about the schism, and he missed his friend; he wondered what he was reading. After he landed his first library position, clerking under the dread thumb of Miss Ogilvie in the northwest branch of the Portland public library, he thought to tell Sandy the news, and Sandy received it with sincere enthusiasm. He invited Bob to his apartment for dinner and Bob happily accepted.

Sandy answered the door in a cooking smock, a cigarette dangling from his lip. “The quiche is cooling,” he said. He led Bob to his den, put on a Martin Denny record, and promptly made a pass. Bob drew away, wiping his mouth and describing his disinclination; Sandy looked surprised, almost incredulous. “You’re telling me you’re not a fairy?” he said.

“Yes, I’m not.”

Sandy sat down. “Are you just saying that because you don’t trust me? Because, Bob? I’m a fairy to the tips of my toes.”

“Yes, I understand. But no, that’s not why I’m saying it.”

“Huh,” Sandy said. “All along and I was sure you were.”

Bob wanted to say he was sorry, but that didn’t feel correct, or fair, or true, so he said, “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.”

Sandy shrugged, his face reflecting a thorough disenchantment. He said, “What a lot of time I gave you.”

Bob was hurt to learn that Sandy’s lengthy attentions were rooted in something other than fellowship. Sandy saw this hurt and said, “I’m sorry, Bob. I know I’m being an asshole about it. But you have to understand I had a whole story going. I thought this was the beginning of something, and it’s not, and that’s okay, but I’m going to need a minute to recover.” They sat to eat the quiche and Sandy told Bob what it would be like to work under Miss Ogilvie. “Ogilvie the Ogre. People call her a bitch and in their defense I believe she is a bitch. But she’s also the librarianist par excellence. The northwest branch is the tightest of tight ships, which endears her to the top brass, which is why she gets all the new stock and periodicals, new carpeting installed every five years, fresh paint, amenity updates, and all the rest of it. Actually, Bob, you may have lucked into something good here, because the Ogre’s not getting any younger — not that anyone is. But she’ll be gone before too long, and whoever gets her recommendation will likely inherit the kingdom. A word to the wise. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“Any intelligent young person’s inclination would be to go against her. It’s the correct thing to do in that her ideas are old and awful and in all honesty she probably should be cast aside; but it’s the wrong way to go about it if you want to make a difference in the long term. Don’t battle a battler, is what I’m telling you. When she’s put out to pasture, or when she receives her last reward, then you can slip right into her hobnail boots and revamp the entire apparatus.”

As the evening wound down, Sandy became maudlin in the looking-back manner. “All my life, all I ever wanted was to be alone in a room filled with books. But then something awful happened, Bob, which was that they gave it to me.”

“But that’s the same thing I want,” said Bob.

“Well hang on to your hat, funny face, because it looks like they’re going to give it to you, too.” Later, when he walked Bob to the door, Bob held out his hand to shake and Sandy looked at the hand and said, “Oh my God.” Bob never contacted Sandy again, and neither did Sandy contact Bob, which was fine, actually, though Bob would always think of him with a fondness of almost-admiration. Bob had liked him for his meanness, drollness, intellect, and antiworldness; but he was relieved by his own relative simplicity, if that was what it was.

DURING BOB’S TWENTY-THIRD YEAR HIS MOTHER ABRUPTLY AND unexpectedly died, leaving him the mint-colored house, which she owned free and clear, the Chevy, which was two years old, and an inheritance of almost twenty thousand dollars. He was not very much burdened by her passing but made lonely by his not understanding who his mother had been in life, and why she’d had a child in the first place. She was not in any way a bad person, but disappointed, and so by extension disappointing, at least to Bob she was.

One does not anticipate premature death by disease, but his mother wasn’t surprised by the news. She asked Bob into the living room one morning to speak about what she called a few things, but it was only one thing, which was that she had cancer in her brain and would soon be dead, and this proved accurate: she retired in February and was gone by June. The last time Bob saw his mother alive was at her bedside in the hospital. She’d lost nearly half her body weight and had the attitude of someone distracted by an imminent voyage. But there was a gravity to her diminished stature that she wore well, Bob thought. Her illness was impressive, and she held in her eye a curious glimmer that hinted at the understanding of a mystery. A nurse stuck her head in the room and told Bob, “Five minutes.” The way she’d spoken these words, slow and throaty, and the way her eyes met Bob’s, he felt she was telling him it was likely time for a final goodbye. And perhaps Bob’s mother was thinking along these lines when she said, “We’ve never discussed your father.” Bob had wanted to know about his father in the past, especially when he was a young boy; but each time he had brought it up his mother had shied away. Now, as an adult, and in the context of the hospital room, he thought he didn’t want to know at all. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” he told her.

“No, I don’t mind it,” she said.

“Okay, but if it’s a bad story then I’d rather not hear about it.”

“It’s not bad. Or I’ve never felt that it was.” She went quiet for long enough that Bob thought she’d forgotten what she was talking about, but then she began. “It was right in the middle of the Depression, and I was sharing an apartment with two girlfriends, and every Friday we went out somewhere, anywhere, and tried to figure out a way to have fun with about a dollar between the three of us. This night we went to a saloon that served a shot with a short beer for a nickel. So, okay, we had a few, and everything was fine until one of the gals got sick to her stomach, so that the other gal had to run her home, and now I’m all alone, and I noticed a fellow looking at me from over in the corner, there — stealing glances when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. But I was paying attention. He was kind of usual-looking, but he had a nice enough suit of clothes on, respectable — but sad. Well, he did look that way, Bob.”

“Sad.”

“Yes. Like something was the matter in his life. For all I know he was always like that, but I had a hunch he was only blue that night, or that week, and I found myself wondering what the problem was, and if there wasn’t maybe something I could do to cheer him up. So what I did, I got up and took my last ten cents and ordered us a shot and chaser apiece, then went over with the drinks on a tray and I set them down on the table and told him, ‘Hello, I’m buying you a drink. Because buster, you look sadder than an old bandage floating in a cold bathtub!’” Bob’s mother was grinning at her memory of this. “Oh, I got him laughing. He had a nice laugh. And you know, sometimes that’s all it takes to make a person funny — to have someone laugh at what you’re saying. But I hit a streak, the way you sometimes do, and it got so that he was slapping the table, and this was how your father and I made friends. Well, he bought the next couple rounds, then he says he’d like to see me home.” Bob’s mother paused to cover and uncover her eyes. “Next morning, and we were not at our best, but there weren’t any sour grapes there, you know what I mean? I was never any grand romancer, but this young lady lived somewhat, and I can tell you that the next morning sometimes is damned awkward, and even awful. Because there are nasty, unhappy men walking around out there, Bob, and they like to trick you into thinking they’re one way, then when it’s too late they show you who they really are. But this guy? He was still the same in the morning as he was in the night — he was himself, and he was, just, good. So, we talked through the morning, and I made him a little breakfast, and we shared a cigarette and there was the question of, what was going to happen? But then the spell of us sort of blinked off, and he stood up and said he should be going — he had to go, he said. And probably it was wishful thinking on my part but it seemed like maybe he wanted to stay longer, for us to spend more time together.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Do I look like him?”

“No, not really.”

“Why didn’t you see him again?”

“I don’t know, Bob. Maybe he was married, or engaged. Maybe he had kids. Who knows?” She shrugged. “But, I wanted you to understand that the story of your father and me is a small story, but that doesn’t mean it’s an unhappy one. I can’t pretend to’ve loved the man, or even to’ve known him, but I liked him, okay? And he liked me too. And that’s not so bad a thing, when you consider all the hell people put each other through.” Bob’s seventy-five-pound mother lay there saying these things to him, her hand folded in a bony clutch, the hospital sheet yanked up to her chin. The nurse returned and told Bob it was time to let his mother rest, and he left.

There were no decisions to be made in terms of the funeral ceremony because every detail had been addressed by Bob’s mother. There were ten or eleven people in attendance; Bob recognized certain of them, women his mother had worked with, some with their husbands, none of whom introduced themselves. It occurred to Bob that these individuals were likely looking at him not as the son of the deceased but as the burden she had shouldered in her lifetime — the infamous bastard child in the flesh. A priest gave a reading of familiar, possibly overfamiliar Bible texts; it was like listening to a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, where the words formed shapes on the air, but the meaning of the words was absent. Bob’s mother’s vessel was witness to this from the comfort of the coffin, which was open just enough that one could view the top of her hair and a small, shadowy segment of the side of her face. Bob had noticed this coffin arrangement when he entered the room but had no reaction to it at first. But soon and he began to dislike it, mildly, then less mildly. There was a funeral matron standing at the head of the pews; when the coffin situation became problematic for Bob, he left his seat and walked up to meet her. “Hello,” he said.

“Well hello to you,” she replied.

Bob explained that he was the son of the deceased and the funeral matron gave his arm a squeeze of sympathy with her white-gloved hand. She asked if he was satisfied with the arrangements and he said he was, but that he was curious about the coffin. Why was it set up like that?

“Like what, sir?”

“Open just a little bit.”

The matron modulated her voice to near a whisper. “The coffin is as requested by the department.”

Bob was alarmed. “Which department do you mean?”

The woman’s eyes suddenly widened and a blush drew up her throat. “Excuse me, my goodness! Not department. Departed.” She exhaled, collecting herself. “The casket is displayed as per your mother’s preference.”

“She asked for it to be like that?” said Bob.

“That’s right, sir. It’s not uncommon, actually. Both the fully open and fully shut casket can feel extreme, when you think of yourself, you know, in there.”

Bob said, “I guess she just wanted to be a peeker.”

“Yes, sir, I believe she did.”

“Okay, well, thank you.”

Bob returned to his seat to find someone was sitting in it. He was a well-fed professional man of sixty years preceded by the reek of eye-stinging cologne. Bob paused to stand over him; the man looked up with a wracked expression that told Bob: go away from me. Bob took a seat in front of the man and resumed his study of the funeral.

Two attendants in matching white button-up shirts came forward to seal the coffin. One was young with a new shirt while the other was not-young with a less-new shirt; Bob thought they looked alike and wondered if the attendants were connected by blood. They wheeled the coffin out of doors and into the adjoining cemetery, with the mourners trailing behind in a shuffling bunch, up a winding footpath and to the top of a grassy hill. A green canvas tent with four rows of folding chairs had been set up; Bob took a seat at the rear of the pack, and the cologne-reeking man sat beside him. The attendants transferred the buffed coffin onto a metal pallet positioned above the open grave. The senior attendant spoke in the junior attendant’s ear before walking away down the hill and in the direction of the church. The junior attendant stood by awhile, looking skyward, then spun about and commenced lowering Bob’s mother into the ground by means of a winch. But the winch’s mechanism was rusted or obstructed and so was squeaking, and then squealing, and finally shrilly squealing so that the sound defined the moment, and the mourners all were wincing by it, and some were covering their ears. Bob’s mother was half underground when the squealing ceased, because the winch had stuck fast on its track. The junior attendant began to harass and jerk the winch in hopes it would become unstuck. This caused the coffin to undergo a similar jerking motion, and all in the small audience were transfixed with the troubling and unwanted thought of the corpse being jostled about. Both Bob and the cologne-reeking man had stood, leaning forward in readiness to cross over to the junior attendant when the senior attendant returned from wherever he’d been, walking as fast as a man can walk without being said to run, and his face was tight and stern as he rested his hand upon the junior attendant’s to still it. The senior attendant again spoke into the junior attendant’s ear, and now the junior attendant went away down the hill. The senior attendant turned to face the mourners and said, in a voice that surprised Bob for its melodious delicacy, “Please bear with us, ladies and gentlemen. I apologize for the disruption and delay. It is the familiar tale of man versus machine. I assure you that man will win out the day, but I ask for your patience, and I thank you for your understanding.” The senior attendant now busied himself inspecting the winch mechanism, while the cologne-reeking man and Bob sat back down.

The mourners all were silent; they sat looking at the casket, or not looking at it, each entertaining his or her thoughts. A gust of wind whipped up from down the rolling cemetery hills and the canvas tent above their heads became full. The wind dropped and the canvas became slack; but seconds later it returned, and in greater force, so that the tent now was lifted completely off the ground, as though an invisible hand had reached down and plucked it clean away. Bob craned his neck to follow the tent’s course of flight, watching as it traveled upright through the air and landing in this same position, the poles behaving as legs, like a drunken horse struggling to maintain its own verticality. The tent tripped and collapsed and lay flat and Bob looked around for someone to make a surprised face at; in doing so he noticed the cologne-reeking man was softly crying. He was staring woebegonely at the casket, and he didn’t register Bob’s interest in him or even that the tent had been blown away. The senior attendant, meanwhile, jumped into action, rushing over to collect the fallen tent, with Bob following after to offer his assistance. Together they stood the tent upright and began walking it back, a pole in each hand, to shelter or rather reshelter the now-squinting, wind-tousled mourners. As Bob was setting his poles back into the holes in the ground he saw that the cologne-reeking man had stopped crying and now sat with a vacant look on his face, a hanky in his fist that rested in such a way as to resemble a melted-away ice-cream cone. Returning to his seat, Bob recognized the gold-embroidered initials sewn into the corner of the hanky, and realized that this man was George Baker-Bailey, his mother’s longtime employer, he of the Christmas hams and late-night telephone calls. He radiated wealth and heft, self-importance, or perhaps just importance, and he must have sensed Bob’s interest because he had turned to meet him as Bob sat down. Holding out a hand, Bob said, “Dad?” and the man shrank in his seat in response to his disgust at the word. “I’m only kidding. Hi, I’m Bob.”

While the senior attendant lapped the tent to shore up the poles, the junior attendant had returned with a ball-peen hammer in his hand. He approached the winch by wide strides, paused to square his feet, and began bashing indiscriminately away; and before the senior attendant could get to him the winch became unstuck, the coffin loosed, dropping the remaining feet in a free fall, and a column of dust shot up from the grave. The junior attendant turned to the mourners, his audience, and he was breathing heavily, and his face told his truth, which was that he was doing his best. There was defiance in his eyes but also a measure of apology. It was clear he suffered both from poor luck and authentic stupidity. The senior attendant stepped forward and took the hammer away from the junior attendant, and now he too faced the small crowd. Bob had a fleeting wish that these two men might join hands, raise them up above their heads, and bow.

MR. BAKER-BAILEY WANTED TO DINE WITH BOB. BOB DIDN’T WANT TO do this but Mr. Baker-Bailey left no room in the conversation to allow for Bob’s wishes, and so it was that they met at a steakhouse downtown. When Bob entered the restaurant he discovered Mr. Baker-Bailey had already finished his first drink and was fitting the second into his hand. A waiter stood by the table, hugging a tray flat against his chest and leaning in to receive Mr. Baker-Bailey’s instruction: “I want you to pay attention so that I’m never without a fresh drink. I don’t want to have to ask, you understand? Because I buried a saint today, and it’s your job to keep me in bourbon until I can’t speak to say stop.” The waiter was turning to go as Bob took his seat; Mr. Baker-Bailey hooked the waiter’s arm and told him, “Not so fast, we’re ready to order.” He told the waiter they would have two rare T-bone steaks, two baked potatoes, and two sides of rice pilaf. The waiter made a note of the order and went away. In explanation of his behavior, Mr. Baker-Bailey told Bob, “T-bones are the specialty of the house. It’s reliable.” Now he relaxed in his seat, looking out the windows at the citizens passing by on the sidewalk. His breathing was slow and measured and Bob suspected the man was preparing to address the life and death of his mother, which was what he was doing. He asked Bob, “What a day, huh?”

“Yes,” Bob said.

“Were you happy with the ceremony?”

“I think so.”

“You think so? I should hope you knew one way or the other, for what it cost, good God.” Mr. Baker-Bailey squinted at the glass of water in Bob’s hand. “Where’s your drink?”

“Water’s fine.”

“Are you kidding me? You don’t drink water on a day like today.” He raised his hand and began snapping his fingers in the air.

Bob said, “It’s all right. I don’t want a drink.”

Mr. Baker-Bailey’s hand came down slowly to rest on the table. “Why don’t you drink?”

“I do drink, only I don’t want one now.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t want to feel that way.”

It took a moment for Mr. Baker-Bailey to accept this; it seemed he thought Bob was being a poor sport. But eventually he shrugged it off and said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, that priest was top shelf. He didn’t come cheap, but I figure he was worth it. It was as important as hell to your mother that she get that particular priest, and I made a promise, so there you go. It costs what it costs, no point grousing about it now, is there? Did you know that she and I worked together for more than twenty years?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty years! That’s a long time, after all.” He paused, and said, “It’s funny, isn’t it, that it took you and me this long to meet?”

“I guess it is,” said Bob. “Though, actually, I did see you once before this.”

“Oh yeah? And when was that?”

“I was eleven years old and you were slow dancing with my mother in our living room.”

A little flash of panic came over Mr. Baker-Bailey, and he finished his bourbon in a long swallow. Looking at the ice cubes in his glass, he began to rattle them around, then raised up his head and called across the restaurant, “What did I tell you?” The waiter came hurrying over with a fresh drink and took away the empty. Mr. Baker-Bailey glared at the waiter’s back in retreat. He told Bob, “I’m upset. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“You’re upset,” said Bob. He was starting to wonder how he might get away without causing a fuss or disruption.

Mr. Baker-Bailey took another long drink. “So what’s your line these days?”

“I’m just starting out as a librarian.”

“That’s good, good. That’s a functional position.” He held his finger in the air, as if checking wind direction. “Somebody wants a book but they don’t know if they want to buy it. Well, here you go, pal, take it home and read the hell out of it. And free of charge to boot. I support the practice. I mean, you’re never going to get rich, but I guess that’s not the point, is it?”

“I guess it’s not.”

“You must have got the book thing from your mother, huh?”

“I must have,” said Bob, though he’d not known his mother to read anything other than magazines and newspapers.

Mr. Baker-Bailey went back to his sidewalk people-watching, speaking to Bob but not looking at him, performing his grief for him: “Your mother? She was my good right hand and then some. And the two of us together? There was nothing we couldn’t do, not a problem we couldn’t solve. Because I knew her. I knew that woman. I knew her better than my own wife!” He chuckled to himself. “Christ, she was just a kid when she started out. We were both kids, really. Young and dumb and full of beans and baloney, baloney and beans.” He finished his drink and another appeared, along with the two identical meals. Mr. Baker-Bailey was heartened by the arrival of the food, glad as he commenced sawing at his steak; but soon and something turned inside him, some unpleasant notion spoiling his mood. “Anyway,” he said, “I figure she made out all right by me.” Bob said nothing; Mr. Baker-Bailey added, “By which I mean I think she could have done worse.” Bob looked at Mr. Baker-Bailey, and something in the look prompted Mr. Baker-Bailey to ask, “Who do you think bought her that house?”

“I thought she bought it.”

“Fine, but where’d she get the money to do that?”

“I thought she earned it.”

Mr. Baker-Bailey sat watching Bob. There was a blockage in his nasal passage and a miniature whistle occurred each time he exhaled. “You got something you want to get off your chest?” he said. “Because I’m here, and I’m all ears.”

Bob thought about it, then shook his head. “I can’t say anything to you.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t have the words.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Just that there are no words for you.”

Mr. Baker-Bailey blinked at Bob, then returned to his meal. It was disturbing to watch him eat because his head was the same color as the steak. He was pushing red meat into his red mouth, and his head was red, and it was like witnessing an animal consuming itself. “Good steak,” he said, mouth filled.

“Okay,” said Bob.

“Why aren’t you eating?”

“I am sickened.”

“Eat your steak, you’ll feel better.”

But Bob couldn’t eat, and didn’t try to. When Mr. Baker-Bailey was done he snapped for the waiter to take the plates away. After, he lit a cigarette, peering up at the smoke as it rose up over their heads. “You know what though?” he asked — and here his composure fell away, and he began crying, and not the modest weeping of the funeral but a hard, loud bawling. All in the restaurant, diners and staff, stopped to stare and wonder; Bob folded his napkin on the table and stood to leave, passing the waiter on his way to the door. The waiter had been walking over to deliver another bourbon, but now he stood by watching the crying man and wondering whether he should bring the drink or not bring it. Bob felt a sympathy for the waiter’s position; the point could be argued both for and against bringing a crying man another drink, and the impasse was almost certainly unprecedented to the waiter’s experience.

NEVER HAS THERE BEEN A LIBRARIAN LESS INCLINED, LESS SUITABLE to represent the limitless glory of the language arts than Miss Ogilvie. She cared not at all for literacy or the perpetuation of any one school or author, and Bob never once saw her take up a book for pleasure. Her function, as she saw it, was to maintain the sacred nonnoise of the library environment. “What these people do with the silence is beyond my purview,” Miss Ogilvie told Bob. “But silence they shall have.” The human voice, when presented above the level of whisper, invigorated her with what could be named a plain hate; as such, her branch was the quietest in the city of Portland and likely the state of Oregon.

For all her strictness of standards, Miss Ogilvie was not beyond reason, and she took things on a case-by-case basis. The homeless population, at least the saner individuals of that group, were for the most part spared the rod. If you kept your mouth shut and your odors were not so flamboyant and you read or believably pretended to read a book or magazine, then yes, you were welcome to come in from the rain of an afternoon. Students of the high school and college age were filled with life, or overfilled with it, Miss Ogilvie believed; they had an inclination to noise-make, but for all their spirit were easily put down. Young children were the real problem, the pinpoint of Miss Ogilvie’s ire, and she saved up all her best and finest venom for them. She spoke of a world without children in the same way others spoke of a world without hunger or disease. Put them all on an island, was her thought, an island far away and surrounded by icy, deadly swells and rocks so sharp and jagged even seabirds could never light upon them. Here the children might make all the noise they wanted or needed to; and here they would be no bother to those who’d had enough noise and chatter to last out their days.

Across Bob’s first year in service, Miss Ogilvie slowly and by degrees took him into her complex confidences. She spoke to Bob of the days of her apprenticeship when she had been allowed, even encouraged, to strike problematic children. During the Second World War, and with so many fathers gone away, there was a laxity of discipline in the home. With no threat of the strap lingering in the minds of the youth, then did they give in to their animal selves. The women of America came together to discuss the issue; a growing faction warmed to the idea of corrective force. “Violence was for men only,” Miss Ogilvie said. “They assumed it as a burden, thinking we were lucky to be apart from the fray. Little did they know there were some among us, and not a small number, either, who had long wished to take part.”

“You were for it,” Bob said.

“Oh yes. And I assumed a role of leadership that was quite a surprise to myself and my colleagues both. It was a case of my not knowing I felt so strongly about something when all at once I was shouting my demands from the podium at the union hall.” She sat up straight. “Do you know what I like most in life, Bob? Practicality. A child is unruly. The child is struck. The child is no longer unruly. Mathematics of the heart. Oh, it was a fine tool. But they’ve taken so many of our tools away from us, and now our youngsters grow ever more blunt, ever more pointless, ever more coarse. The thing I don’t understand is, why should it come down to us to teach them manners? Why should it come down to me?”

Miss Ogilvie and Bob had no common ground aesthetically or intellectually but Bob, always mindful of Sandy Anderson’s advice, was supportive of her quest for soundlessness, and did not attempt to bend her will toward a more moderate environment. She was wrongheaded, perhaps a little bit insane; she was also two years past the traditional point of retirement. Soon enough and she would be gone; in the meantime, Bob was learning his craft.

The work itself was not ever difficult, at least not for Bob. He felt uncomplicated love for such things as paper, and pencils, and pencils writing on paper, and erasers and scissors and staples, paper clips, the scent of books, and the words on the pages of the books. Sometimes he thought of the women and men who’d composed these documents sitting at their desks and aiming for the elusive bull’s-eye and almost always missing but sometimes not, and Bob was certain that a room filled with printed matter was a room that needed nothing. His colleagues weren’t unfriendly, but vague in the face, and with not much to say. Some among them complained of the tedium of the profession, and Bob always expressed his sympathies, but really he had no comprehension of the sentiment. He understood that the people who knew boredom in the role of librarian were simply in the wrong profession. He didn’t judge them for it but felt a relief at not being like them.

As the newcomer, and lowest on the pole, he was given the morning shift, which was considered undesirable owing to its hours, but for Bob it achieved a lifestyle ideal. Every morning his alarm sounded at 5:00 a.m., and he came downstairs in his pajamas to light the fire he’d assembled the night before. As the fire took shape, Bob went back upstairs to shower and dress for the day. He owned two suits and alternated one to the other, going casual each third day: tieless, white button-down shirt under a dark V-neck, black slacks, black socks, black penny loafers. Dressed, his naked face stinging with aftershave, Bob returned to the living room to find the fire crackling and throwing its shifting light across the floor and walls. He ate his breakfast, then prepared and packed his lunch. If it was a particularly cold morning he would start the Chevy and leave it idling in the driveway while he washed the dishes.

As a child and teenager, Bob had been afraid of becoming an adult, this in response to an idea his mother had unwittingly instilled in him, which was that life and work both were states of unhappiness and compromise. But Bob’s mother had never understood the pleasures of efficiency, the potential for grace in the achievement of creature comforts. She cooked but hated cooking. She cleaned and felt cheated. Bob didn’t feel this way; the actions he performed each morning were needed, and each one fit into the next. He drove over empty, rain-wet streets and across the river to work. The parking lot was empty, the library silent as he crossed the carpeted front room and to his desk, where he turned on his green-shaded lamp and smoked a cigarette and read the library’s newspaper. After, he set up for the day, turned on all the lights, unlocked the doors, and then came the workday proper. At the commencement of his career he was uncomfortable in his dealings with the public but his shyness passed when he recognized they were not addressing him as a human being but using him as a tool, a mechanism of the library machinery.

Miss Ogilvie saw in Bob a librarian in his element, and she left him to his own devices. When she told him she was taking him off the mornings and putting him on afternoon shift, he asked if he couldn’t stay on as he had been. She asked him why and he explained his preference, his affection for the quiet mornings, and Miss Ogilvie stared, surprised that she should still be able, after all this time, to feel any manner of connection with another person. Her path was ever more rigid, crueler than Bob’s; but she liked that he was the way he was, and she understood it, even if it didn’t mirror precisely her personal experience.

Here was where Bob Comet had landed, then, and he was not displeased that this should be the case. The northwest branch of the public library was where Bob Comet became himself. It was also where he met Connie and Ethan. Connie came first but she didn’t appear as Connie until after Ethan, so really, Ethan came first.

CONNIE CAME FIRST BUT WAS OBSCURED BY HER FATHER, SOMETHING of a legend around the neighborhood in that he did wear a self-made cape and was given to bursts of critical public oration. His mind was teeming with unfriendly thoughts and special threats and he felt these were of a rare and high quality and that it was for the greater good that they be heard. But the era of the soapbox-in-the-square had passed; for want of a forum he gave voice to his points of view in the streets, in parks, often at bus stops, but most commonly on the buses themselves, where people were held captive. The content of the speeches was various but typically of a nature hostile toward mankind’s contemporary behaviors, with close attention paid to the Catholic Church.

The bus drivers did not like Connie’s father’s performances very much, and some did eject him, but many, owing to complacency or fear, let him go on and on. There was one driver who encouraged him via the overhead address system, saying things like “Could you repeat that, sir?” and “Do you have any documentation to support the argument?” and “He seems to really mean that, folks,” and “Let’s give a round of applause to the lively little fellow in sandals.”

There was a figure behind this obstinate individual, and that was Connie. Bob didn’t notice her for a time, as she was hidden away beneath a cape of her own, hers featuring a generous hood, obscuring not only her face but also her gender. She never spoke or made any sudden movements; she trailed after her father or sat in a chair by the library entrance to wait for him, sometimes for the better part of an hour, her posture straight, her hands folded on her lap, gaze focused on the ground.

Connie’s father was on his better behavior in the library. He was always curt, but he was quietly curt. When Bob engaged him, Connie’s father did not try to hide his contempt, but neither did he rail against Bob, as he surely would have had they met on the sidewalk. Connie’s father’s area of focus in terms of his reading was American history, from the country’s conception and up to the current year of 1958. It had become something of a game among the younger library employees to try to uncover the mysteries of the man; one morning at the checkout counter, Bob asked, “No interest in European history, sir?” Connie’s father sighed at the energy he would need to expend in answering the question. He said, “Europe is in the past, is deceased, and so is not my concern. America is imperiled, and will almost certainly follow Europe’s path, but we’ve not yet fallen, and we’re here now, and must do what we can with the time remaining.”

“I didn’t know Europe was doing so bad as that,” Bob said.

“Try opening your eyes. Try opening a newspaper.”

“I’ll do that, sir. Have a nice day.”

Connie’s father turned away, and there in his place stood Connie, watching Bob from under her hood and with a sly look that told him she knew her father was a foolish person, that she knew Bob knew this, and that she was gratified they were in agreement on this point. From this moment forward, and whenever Connie came to the library, she and Bob engaged in a study of one another, but modestly, and with not a word between them. Many weeks passed, throughout which Connie’s father behaved himself; but there was always the sense, for Bob and Connie both, of the situation’s tenuousness, that Connie’s father would at some point lose control of himself. His undoing could have come on any day of any season and for any reason, but it came in the summer, and was encouraged by the presence of two priests.

It was not uncommon to see a priest, or more often a pair of priests, making use of the library. There was a seminary some miles away in Forest Park and so Bob came into regular contact with their ilk. They were unimportant-question-askers and very-small small-talkers, remarkable for their sameness and, according to Bob’s experience, uniformly desirous to make contact with the world outside of their own. Not one among them could ever simply check out his books and depart; he had to contemplate this or that author, ask for recommendations, review the day’s weather or the weather of the day preceding. Their reading favored current fiction of a page-turning sort: cozy mysteries, tales of wartime adventure, espionage — just so long as the narrative moved at a nice clip and was devoid of art and sex and vice. Bob had no particular care for or opinion of the priests. When they spoke to him, he picked up a labored modesty that was the result, he supposed, of their belief that they were representing God on Earth. As a nonbeliever, Bob found this weary-making but endeavored to think of the priests as eccentric rather than boorish.

The two who came in the day Connie’s father was barred from the library were well known to Bob. There was the full-faced, florid priest, a squat fellow of thirtyish years, and his senior, a priest of the classical Irish mold: tall and rangy, bushy eyebrows and thick white hair combed back. They walked among the stacks, the white-haired priest pointing out this book or that, while the florid priest listened with an attentiveness that did look embellished, sycophantic. Bob was pondering their dynamic when he noticed Connie’s father, a wolfish grin on his face, edging closer to the pair. Connie stood behind her father; Bob couldn’t see her expression behind the hood but her physicality read as worried, bothered: she held her hands together at her chest and crept forward, forward, then halted. She knew something had to happen, and that it would not be pleasant, and that there was nothing to do but wait for it, to watch it, and now it began: the white-haired priest was reading a book’s back jacket when Connie’s father moved in and snatched it from his hand. “Excuse me,” the priest said, “I was looking at that book.”

“Yes, and getting your dirty handprints all over it!” said Connie’s father. “You should be ashamed to come in here with hands as dirty as yours.”

The priest was surprised by the outburst, so much so that he couldn’t find his language; he turned to his colleague with a look of incredulity, an invitation to become involved on his behalf. The florid priest took up the challenge, asking Connie’s father, “Look here, what is this? What are you after, eh?”

Connie’s father turned. “And you!” he said. “Walking around with filth all across your face. How dare you speak to the likes of me with your face in such a state!” He batted a hand across the florid priest’s nose. It was not a blow of true violence; it did not injure the man, but he was startled by the physical contact and drew back in a flinch, raising a hand to shield his face against any further molestation. Connie’s father was pleased by the effect his behaviors had upon these two, and he considered them bettered. “What is it, don’t you have running water up at that buffoon’s academy you live in? Or are the pair of you simply too lazy to maintain the most basic levels of hygiene?”

Miss Ogilvie and Bob were standing side by side at the Information desk, and so had witnessed the episode together. Bob was moving to intervene when Miss Ogilvie clamped a hand on his forearm. She walked around the desk and toward Connie’s father with an eerie, sideways glint in her eye, as one in a trance. Touching her long finger to Connie’s father’s shoulder, she asked, “May I see your library card, please?” Connie’s father turned away from the priests to consider the person of Miss Ogilvie. They had been sizing each other up for months, each of them knowing this reckoning had to come, and here it was, and they stood staring at one another for what Bob felt was an awful length of time. The emotional information moving between the pair was unknown; clearly, though, there was some manner of psychic showdown taking place. In the end it was Miss Ogilvie crowned the victor: Bob watched as Connie’s father’s hand began to move, as if without its owner’s consent, to seek out and pass over his library card. Miss Ogilvie received this, held it up, and with a glorious slowness, ripped it in half. Tucking the two pieces into the pocket of her cardigan, she told Connie’s father, “You have irrevocably lost your rights to access the public library system in Oregon, effective immediately. If you ever set foot in this or any other branch in the state you will be arrested at once and prosecuted as a malicious trespasser. Now I’ll ask you to walk this way, please.” She gestured to the exit and stepped in that direction. Connie’s father did not follow immediately after but stood by, blinking and making to collect his wits. He had been temporarily dazzled by Miss Ogilvie’s awesome powers of negative confidence but now, recognizing his time of triumph had passed, some of his own negativity returned: looking back to the priests, he leaned toward them and spit at their feet. With that, he left the library, and Connie followed quietly after. After they’d gone, Bob came forward with a rag to wipe up the spit; Miss Ogilvie took the rag from Bob, got down on her knees, and cleaned the floor herself, bony backside bobbing in the air. Bob looked to the priests, to gauge their reaction at this unexpected visual, but the florid priest was gently touching his nose to check for tenderness while the white-haired priest made a discreet inspection of the state of his hands.

A week after this event, Connie came to the library alone. She was decked out in her usual garb but with the hood of the cape worn down. Her hair was middle length, blondish and flat, and she had not a trace of makeup on her face; but it seemed to Bob she was enjoying visibility, being a young woman in the world, in contrast to whatever genderless figure her father wished her to be when they were together. She set a tall stack of books on the counter and stood by, watching Bob. “Returning?” he asked, and she nodded. He was wondering if she was allowed to speak in public, or at all, when she shifted and said in a raspy voice, “I can’t tell if you recognize me or not.”

“I do,” he said. “The cape gives it away.”

“Oh, right,” she said, looking down. “Well, I’m returning my father’s books to you. But, I also have a list of books I’m meant to check out. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Why would it be?”

“Because of what happened. The books are for him, not me.”

Bob said, “It’s not for me to ask who the books are for; and you don’t have to say. If you have a valid library card and no outstanding fines, you can check out whatever books you wish.”

“And what if I don’t have a library card?”

“Then we’ll get you one.”

“And what if I don’t have any identification?”

“You don’t have any on you, you mean?”

“I mean I don’t have any at all. Personal identification is one of the things father is against.”

Bob wouldn’t have considered commenting on this were it not for the young woman’s obvious amusement in discussing her father’s behaviors, which prompted him to say, “He strikes me as the kind of man who is against many things.”

“Oh, yes, and more all the time,” she said, and began naming them off one by one. “Television, obviously, and film — moving images. But also radio — fictitious writing of any sort. Privately owned automobiles. All unnatural scent or flavor. All music. Exercise for exercise’s sake. Sunglasses. Calendars, watches. Escalators, elevators. Police, government, doctors, medicine.”

“What is he for?”

“Gender segregation. Sterilization of criminals. Public transportation. The death penalty. Disease. Gardening.”

“Gardening he supports.”

“He himself doesn’t garden, but he supports the action; it’s one of the very few things he encourages me to indulge in.”

“You like gardening?”

“Gardening is very important to me.”

“Decorative gardening or gardening for the table?”

“Both.” She liked that he’d asked that particular question. She watched him without shyness, and Bob felt exposed but he affected, as best he could, an unruffled ease.

“How can someone be in favor of disease?” he asked.

“He believes it achieves God’s will.”

“That’s not very friendly.”

“No, but friendliness isn’t in his wheelhouse. I mean, it’s not so simple as his believing that someone dying of cancer deserves it. There are many, he says, who the Lord calls back because He wants them close by.”

Bob and Connie were smiling at each other. “How does your father expect you to check out books without identification?”

“He believes I’ll fail; but he was game for me to try.”

“So this was your idea?”

“Oh, yes. His history books give him something to do. He’s away for hours each day, reading himself blind. For me these are precious and necessary hours, and I honestly don’t know what I’ll do if I lose them, and so here I am.” She paused. “I don’t mean to put you on the spot. I understand you may not want to involve yourself. I wouldn’t have bothered to try for a card at all but I thought I saw some sympathy coming from your side these last few months.”

Bob understood by this that his presence was a requisite piece of the young woman’s plan, and he was so delighted to have been in her thoughts he would have given her the keys to his car if she’d wanted to borrow it. “Of course, you can have a card,” he said.

“Really?” said Connie. “You’re sure that would be all right?”

“Why not? I’d ask you to keep my part in it to yourself.”

“Oh, yes.”

“And, I’d advise you to leave the cape at home next time. Even with the hood down, Miss Ogilvie might make the connection.”

“Is that the woman who went after my father?”

“Yes.”

“She’s formidable. My father thinks she’s inhabited by Satan.”

“That’s a popular theory,” said Bob. “I myself don’t believe it.” He brought out the necessary forms for receiving a library card, filling them out on her behalf, which allowed him both to spend more time with her and ask her all manner of personal questions. This was how he learned her name: Connie Coleman.

“What is your age, Connie Coleman?”

“Twenty years of age.”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Okay.”

He handed over the temporary card and watched her flipping it over. Bob wondered if her life was small in the way his was small. Knowing that he was crossing a boundary, he said, “I can’t tell if you believe any of this stuff your father believes.” Connie tucked her card away into the folds of her cape. “Well,” she said, “I live in an abnormal environment. So I must be at least a little bit abnormal myself, right?”

“Right,” said Bob.

“And while the partial truth is that I don’t believe, the fuller truth is that I believe just enough that I’m uncomfortable talking about my not believing.” Bob held up his hand, as if to say he understood, and wouldn’t follow the line of questioning any further. “My aspiration is to become a completely normal human being,” Connie said. “That’s my aspiration as well,” said Bob. Thinking this was the conclusion of their conversation, and wanting to end on a note of charity, he told her, “I’m sorry about what happened with your father.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Connie lightly.

“What I mean is — I’m sorry that it happened the way it happened.”

“Well, thanks,” she said. “But, that’s the way it always happens.”

Bob wished her a good-day and stepped tentatively away, watching as she looked over the list of titles her father had written out for her. Looking up, she stood puzzling over her position in the library. Bob returned to her and volunteered to assist in collecting the books, which she agreed would be helpful. “It’s a funny little list,” she said in warning. “I’m just the man,” he told her, and together they walked up and down the aisles. He soon found each of the books her father wanted, then checked them out for Connie. After, he walked her to the exit, and they stood together a little longer, awkward in their parting. Connie told Bob, “I’m not sorry my father was kicked out of here. Because it’s nice to get out and speak to people without having him around. Honestly, it’s nicer than I can say. Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ll see you again sometime, maybe.”

Bob pointed at the Information counter. “That’s where I like to stand.” After Connie was gone Bob walked to the restroom and locked himself in a stall to stand and relive his meeting with this new person, this young woman. He was confused and giddy and scared. At one point he wondered if he was charming. Was he? He had never been before. Or was it that he’d simply never had the chance to indulge?

By this time, Bob had established the beginnings of a friendship with Ethan Augustine. Male comradeship, like romantic love, had eluded Bob through the length of his life, when suddenly here was Ethan, and he was charming and good or goodish, and he liked Bob, and Bob didn’t quite understand why, but he went along with it if only to see where it might go. The night of the day Bob had first spoken with Connie, he met Ethan for a drink at the bar down the block from the library, and set about explaining his experience in detail. By telling the story, it sounded flimsy to Bob, as if nothing much had happened at all. But why could he not stop thinking of Connie even briefly? And was he such a fool to think the connection was shared? “Maybe it was all in my head,” said Bob. Ethan, who understood as well as anyone that romantic emotion was often to the side of language, said, “But maybe it was in hers too.” Bob was doubtful, but he began watching his days afterward, watching the door of the library and wondering when this person would come again. When he next saw her she was cape-less, in a wine-colored sweater and tweed skirt, black tights and flats, and he understood when their eyes met that he was very seriously sickened by an ancient and terrorific affliction.

IT WAS ON ONE OF BOB’S FAVORED QUIET LIBRARY MORNINGS THAT he first met Ethan. Bob pulled into the lot and discovered a battered and hubcapless 1951 Mercury parked at a skewed angle in his spot. He sat idling in his Chevy, and he understood for the hundredth time that it was other people who made for problems in this life. He parked and approached the Mercury. There was a body slumped facedown across the front seat, and for one instant Bob thought it was a corpse. But when he rapped on the window the body stretched itself, and groaned, and this was Ethan. Sitting, he looked up at Bob, smiling already, easy in the skin of himself, handsome in his dishevelment. “Hi,” he said, rolling down the window. “How you doing?”

“You can’t park here,” Bob told him.

“Can’t I?” Ethan looked around at the empty lot. “Why not?”

Bob pointed at the sign in front of the car: PARKING FOR LIBRARY STAFF ONLY. Ethan read the sign. He said, “I’ve parked in your special space.”

Bob couldn’t say for certain whether or not this person was making fun of him. “Just, move it along, all right?” he said, and Ethan began the ritual of starting his car: pumping the gas and jiggling the steering wheel back and forth. He reached to turn the key in the ignition, then froze. “I just remembered something.”

“What?”

“I can’t move the car. Or I could, but I can’t go home, and so I’d really rather not move it, because there’s nowhere else for me to be right now.” Ethan pointed. “What if I parked in one of these other, less special spots?”

“Why can’t you go home?”

“Well, there’s a whole long story there, but in a nutshell it’s that it could be bad for my health.”

“Why?”

“I’d have to tell you the whole long story to answer that question.”

Bob looked at the library and back. “Couldn’t you tell me a shortened version?”

“Yes, I could do that,” said Ethan, and he sat up straight to tell it.

He lived in an apartment above the pharmacy across the street from the library. The night before he’d returned home after seeing a movie, and in prowling up the block in search of a parking spot noticed that the light in his apartment was on, though he distinctly remembered turning it off. He sat idling awhile, and soon saw an individual he now described to Bob as “a man I know who wants to kill me” stepping around inside his bedroom. Thinking to wait it out, Ethan moved his car off the street and into the library lot, behind a shrubbery bisecting the library property from the sidewalk. From this vantage point, Ethan explained, he could see into his apartment but was himself hidden away. He had spent the night on stakeout, then, succumbing to sleep only as the sun was coming up.

Bob asked, “How do you know he’s still in there?”

“That white pickup truck’s his,” Ethan said.

“Why don’t you call the police?”

“That’s a fair question, but a complicated one, and the answer, unfortunately, is that the man who wants to kill me is himself a policeman.” Ethan lit a cigarette and sat there as if considering the experience of smoking. It was here that Bob had his first sense of liking Ethan. It came over him strongly and was confusing in that he didn’t understand what had happened to inspire it. At any rate, his initial annoyance at the distraction from his perfected morning was gone. “Okay,” said Bob. “Next question. Why does the man want to kill you?”

“Well, now, there’s a story there, also.”

“A long story?”

“No, it’s quite a brief story.” He ashed his cigarette out the window. “Can I ask your name?”

“Bob.”

“Nice to meet you, Bob. I’m Ethan.”

“Hi, Ethan.”

“Hi. Now, the truth of the matter in terms of this man’s wanting to kill me is that there is a wife involved.”

“The man’s wife.”

“The man’s wife and not mine, that’s right, Bob. It’s a dusty old tale and they’ve written a thousand lousy songs about it but what are you going to do? The wife and I achieved a familiarity. And my understanding had been that she and I would keep this off the books. So maybe it’s that I made a mistake in supporting the understanding, or she made one in betraying it. Either way, here I sit.”

They both had been gazing up at the window of the apartment as Ethan explained his position, and so they both saw the figure of a man passing by, a blur of ruddy flesh, a significant, heavily browed face looking quickly out and around, then disappearing. “Did you see?” asked Ethan excitedly.

“I saw. Big fellow, isn’t he?”

“He isn’t small,” Ethan said.

“Is he not wearing a shirt?”

“He took it off around four a.m.”

Bob shifted his weight. “Why would he take off his shirt?”

Ethan made the I-don’t-know gesture with his hands, and his expression read of world-weariness. Bob invited Ethan in for a cup of coffee. “I don’t want to get you into trouble,” Ethan answered, but he was grinning as he spoke, already moving to open the door of his car.

They entered the library and Bob made a pot of coffee while Ethan poked around. He didn’t appear to consider any of the events of the morning odd or worrisome. Bob went about his setting-up routine and Ethan followed behind. He instantly understood what Bob might enjoy about this process. “It’s nice here, isn’t it?” he said. “All quiet like this?”

Bob felt a little shy, as though a secret vice had been uncovered, but said, “I like it.”

“And I suppose you’re a fiend for books?”

“I suppose I am.”

“I keep meaning to get to books but life distracts me.”

“See, for me it’s just the opposite,” Bob said. He thought it a good quip but its quality was not remarked on. “And what do you do?” he asked Ethan.

“Not very much. My father used to ask me, ‘How are you going to make your living answer, Ethan?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know, Dad.’ And I wasn’t lying, either — I didn’t know, and I still don’t know.”

“Do you have any job at all?”

“I have had any number of jobs, Bob, thank you for your concern. But none of them held my interest for very long. I’m at the sweet spot of my unemployment just now.”

“What’s the sweet spot?”

“It just started, and I don’t have to think of it ending for months.”

“And what do you do with your time?”

“Goof around, have fun adventures.” He shrugged. “I’m twenty-four, and I’m not very worried about it.”

“I’m twenty-four too,” said Bob.

“You don’t seem twenty-four.”

“I don’t feel twenty-four,” Bob said.

Ethan pointed out that he might be stuck there awhile, and he asked for a book recommendation to pass the time. Bob, sharing a joke with himself, gave him Crime and Punishment.

“What’s it about?” asked Ethan.

“Just those two things.”

Ethan shrugged and sighed and settled in at an empty table and opened to the first page. Bob unlocked the front doors at eight thirty. It was raining all through the morning hours, and foot traffic was sparse. Ethan sat with his Dostoyevsky, occasionally peering out the window to see if the white truck still was there, and it was. At lunch they split Bob’s sandwich. Bob asked Ethan what he thought of the book and Ethan said, “I wasn’t interested at the start, now I can’t stop reading. But why does everybody have two names?” After the sandwich, they sat smoking in the break room. Ethan said, “I’ve been thinking. What if you went over and knocked on my door?”

“Why would I do that?”

“To gather an impression of the scene.”

“Is your impression of the scene not as clear as mine?”

“Yes, all right, but you could speak with this guy, maybe get an idea of how long he’s planning on hanging around, you know?”

Bob was surprised to be giving the idea any consideration at all, but there was some aspect to the story of Ethan’s morning, in addition to the way he had approached the situation, that prompted in Bob a similarly casual attitude. He was having fun, and this was uncommon enough that he felt a compulsion to carry on. But now, with Bob pulling on his coat, Ethan was having second thoughts. “I wouldn’t want him to kill you,” he said.

“He doesn’t want to kill me,” said Bob, suddenly defending the plan.

“So far as we know. But what if his mechanism has gone haywire and now he wants to kill for killing’s sake?”

Bob said he thought that was unlikely. If the man wished to kill generally, would he hide himself away in an empty apartment? Ethan accepted this as true-sounding and he wished Bob luck and health, a speedy return. Bob crossed the street and climbed the stairs and knocked on the door of the apartment and the door swung open and there stood a man around forty years of age, his hair a shining, molded pompadour, his eyes glassy, and his face set in the expression of someone amused by his own exclusive sickness. He’d put his shirt on but it was untucked and unbuttoned, exposing a great belly, bald, blotchy-red, rotund but firm, as if filled with air. Bob’s impression of the man was that he was crazy and scary and that he would be hard to hurt. He bid him a good morning and asked if Ethan was at home; the man answered in a high, antic voice: “No, he’s not around right now!”

“Do you know where he is?” said Bob.

“I don’t know, no!”

“Are you expecting him anytime soon?”

The man became solemn. “Well,” he said, “the way I see it, at some point he’ll have to come back, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, I guess it is,” said Bob, peering over the man’s shoulder to survey Ethan’s apartment. He was seeking out any sign of vandalism or defacement when he noticed a stubby, snub-nosed black handgun resting atop Ethan’s coffee table. Bob told himself he mustn’t stare at the gun, but then he found he couldn’t not. The man followed Bob’s sight line and now also was staring at the gun. A look of grim amusement crept across his face and he started nodding, as if at the shared understanding of the weapon’s presence. “I’d invite you in to wait,” he said, “but I don’t think that I should do that!”

“Of course, yes, I understand,” said Bob, backing into the hallway. “Why don’t I try again another day?”

“Why don’t you?” the man said, then shut the door, and Bob went down the stairs and returned to the library. Ethan was back at his table, reading with an intense look on his face. As Bob walked up, Ethan dog-eared his page and looked up questioningly.

“Yeah,” said Bob, “you’re definitely not going to want to go home for a while.”

Ethan winced. “He’s angry?”

“He seems pretty happy, actually. I mean, you know, he’s insane.” Bob lowered his voice. “I think there was a pistol on the coffee table?”

“You think there was one or there was one?”

“It looked like a pistol.”

“Nothing looks like a pistol but a pistol.”

“I guess I meant it could have been a toy.”

“Who brings a toy pistol to the apartment of the man you’re planning on killing?”

“I don’t know. No one, I guess.”

“I don’t think anyone would,” said Ethan, agreeing. “Let’s assume, then, that it was a pistol and it was real and it’s his intention to use it to kill me.”

“Let’s assume that,” said Bob. And then, brightening: “He put his shirt on. Unbuttoned and untucked, but still — moving in the right direction.” This news gave way to a long silence. Bob said, “Maybe it’s time to find a new apartment.”

Ethan shook his head. “Out of the question, Bob. I love that apartment. No, I’ll wait him out; after he’s gone, I’ll just need to keep on my toes for another week or so. Our friend’s bitterness will last forever, but his rage has to pass. He’ll tell himself and his beer buddies he set out to kill me but couldn’t find me. Then he’ll get drunk and screw his wife for the full forty-five seconds — really teach her who’s boss. By lunchtime of that next day he’ll be lost to the cycle of his miserable life and I’ll become one more unhappy memory in his rearview mirror.”

This was said so casually that Bob thought it must surely be a case of false bravado; but in time he learned Ethan almost never felt things like fear, embarrassment, worry, regret. Bob returned to work and Ethan to his book. It was after three o’clock in the afternoon when Ethan saw that the white truck had gone. “And he turned off the lights, how thoughtful.” He stood up stretched and asked, “Can I borrow this book?”

“It’s a library,” said Bob, “so yes, you can.”

But Ethan didn’t have a library card, and so, as with Connie, Bob filled out the paperwork and passed over the temporary card. Ethan thanked Bob for his help and turned to leave. Bob asked, “What if it’s a trick and he’s waiting in there still?”

“I don’t care anymore,” said Ethan. “I’m going home. If I’m slain, tell the world I died for love, or some close cousin of it.”

Bob watched Ethan move the Mercury from the library lot and across the street, parking in the same place the white truck had been. He slipped up the stairwell, and as there was no clap of gunfire, Bob decided Ethan was not murdered. The next afternoon Ethan returned the Dostoyevsky, having finished the book after reading long into the night and through the morning. He said he wanted another book that made him feel just the same way, and did Bob have any recommendations that he would care to share and Bob answered that as a matter of fact and as it happened, he did.

CONNIE’S FATHER WAS SURPRISED AT HER SUCCESS AT KEEPING HIM in books, but also paranoid the whole operation might fold under scrutiny; he began digesting texts at a mad pace, and so it was ever more common that Bob should see Connie’s knowing face coming in the door at the library. She established a routine of first gathering her father’s books, then lingering at the Information desk opposite Bob, perched lightly on the edge of a stool. She had many questions for Bob, and she asked them, and she found his answers encouraging: he owned a house, he lived alone, he was satisfied in his work and didn’t engage in any of the off-putting pastimes of the young American male. She thought it odd he had only one friend; and then she learned the friendship was quite new. What had he done with his free time before? And why did he smile so strangely at the words, free time? When she accused him of staidness, he made to defend himself by telling her the story of the Hotel Elba, which in brief was that Bob had run away from home at the age of eleven, stowed away on a train and then a bus, traveling clear to the ocean, where he managed to insinuate himself as a guest at the seaside hotel. He stayed several days, one among a cast of human curiosities who seemed in his memory to have existed inside of some enigmatical play. Connie could only just believe that the event had truly taken place, but she liked that Bob had run away, and was moved at the thought of Bob-as-child, entering an unknowable world in search of a superior experience to the one he knew at home.

Bob had his own set of questions for Connie, and she was forthcoming and undramatic in a way that made his asking enjoyable. Connie’s life had not always been so particular; by which it is meant that her father had not always been so unsound. She had attended public school, for example, from kindergarten and through to graduation from high school. It was not until Connie’s mother died during Connie’s seventeenth year that her father veered from the traditional devout suburbanite and into the realm of the zealot. Weeks of polite inquiry gave way to thornier territory, and Bob one day asked, “What exactly is the matter with your father?” Connie didn’t mind the question particularly, but it was not so simple to answer as it dealt in myriad phases, multilayered narrative, and a goodly amount of conjecture. In short, she said, life was what was the matter with him. But the fuller answer came over many visits and conversations.

Her father was disillusioned not by what had but by what had not happened to him; and as with so many unhappy people, he was defined by his failure. He’d known the call of the church from his childhood and when he came of age had approached the priesthood by running leap. The church did not feel he had a place in their ranks, however; he was discouraged in his efforts, and then sharply discouraged. When Connie’s father demanded to know precisely what the issue was it was explained to him by a parish representative that the men and women of the community didn’t like being around him, didn’t like him, and so it ran contrary to common sense that the church would train and prepare him for a position that would inevitably put him in close contact with said community. “Your faith is evident,” the representative told him. “It’s your social talents, or lack of them, that we take issue with.” Connie’s father received this assessment as a blunt trauma from which he could never recover. Even after he achieved a distance from the church, after he’d married and sired a daughter, there still existed in his mind a fixation, a powerful need for any stripe of revenge that did not diminish with the passage of time.

Connie’s mother proved a steadying presence, and talented at diffusing her husband’s less-healthy inclinations; she allowed him his letters to the editor but drew the line at physical confrontations and one-man demonstrations. Connie spoke of her mother appreciatively, but without love. “That she would choose to give her life to a man like my father tells me she entered into adulthood looking to make compromises, so I never did respect her, but she was comparatively down-to-earth, and her influence over my own life was helpful. Looking back I guess I have a lot to thank her for. Because my childhood experience wasn’t half as risky as my home life is now. After she died, my father was let off his leash.”

Connie’s mother possessed a modest legacy that had long kept their home intact; once she was gone it was revealed by way of the will that the legacy was not so modest after all, which would have been good news were it not for the sting of betrayal that accompanied it. Connie’s father had no inkling that he was a member of the upper-middle rather than the lower-middle class, and he was scandalized that such a thing should have been kept from him. This bad feeling joined forces with his other bad feelings and became one big bad feeling. Free to do as he wished, now, and with all the money he could need for the upkeep of his lifestyle, Connie’s father gave in to his long-suppressed and stranger inclinations.

His demands of his daughter came one at a time, and almost sheepishly. He would bring up this or that concern as though it were only half a thought: “I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t make some changes to the clothes you wear, Connie.” Once an individual concern was addressed and the change enacted he behaved as if it had always been so and was the norm — and to stray from the norm was sinful, unthinkable. Over the next eighteen months he became an unbending and tyrannical maniac for whom to leave the house was to enter the field of battle. Which was all fine for him, Bob supposed, but why was Connie made to come along on these campaigns? “Well, that’s a toughy, Bob. I think the short answer is that he believes he’s earning his ticket to Glory, and he’s after my being saved along with him. I don’t doubt it’s hard to read, but my father, in his way, is very devoted to me.” She paused. “You understand he’s never hit me or anything, right?” This was helpful for Bob to hear; because he had not understood this, and the thought had nagged him. Connie, sensing his further curiosity, told him, “And he’s not one of these perverts, either.”

“Good, great,” said Bob.

She was two years out of high school with no plan or desire to continue her education. As it had been with Bob, she’d made no significant friendships in school, but whereas he had been an unknown in his peer group, Connie had had a more involved and confrontational experience. She came under the category of Other, as her language and behaviors were considered obscure by those around her. Certain of the bolder boys made romantic overtures in her direction but they were met with unblinking ambivalence and cryptic dismissals; these same boys came together to discuss Connie Coleman’s spookiness. She was made uncomfortable by the young men, and young men in general. They were so totally without empathetic sensation that Connie thought they should not be granted access to walk among the population, much less given permission to operate automobiles on our streets and highways. Her female peers, she said, explained her away by saying she was a snob and a witch both. “And at the same time,” she told Bob. “Imagine that.” The word snob was not an accurate descriptor, according to Bob’s understanding of her personality; but he was not surprised by its employment. Connie could never be demure, and confidence of her sort, in the era of the mid-to-late 1950s, was unwelcome. He believed her ostracism was borne of a kind of envy summoned by Connie’s self-knowledge. Bob saw no evidence supporting the theory of her being a witch.

Time passed at the Information desk with Bob and Connie coming to learn the details of one another’s lives. Bob felt the burgeoning relationship was going very well, and it was, but the next level felt far-off for him. Connie had offered any number of hints she would like to visit Bob’s house, hints that became declarations: “I’d like to see this famous house sometime.”

“Oh, sure, of course,” Bob would answer, then excuse himself to blot the sweat from his forehead in the restroom. Connie saw that Bob was out of his depth and that she would need to give a nudge; at last she dinged the counter bell and said, “If you don’t invite me to your house right this second, I’m walking out the door forever, Bob Comet. How’s that for Information?” Bob touched the brass dome of the bell to quiet it and said that yes, she was officially invited, and on the following Sunday she played at being ill so to excuse herself from her traditional bus-riding rounds with her father. After he’d left for the day, she dressed, picked an assortment of flowers from her garden, and took a taxi across the river to Bob’s house. She knocked on his front door, bouquet in hand; when Bob answered, he was also holding a bouquet of flowers. They exchanged bouquets and moved to the kitchen, where Connie sought out a vase and filled it with water, mingling the flowers together. She set the vase on the table in the nook, then broke off to look about the house. Bob followed behind her, naming things: here was where he read; here was where he also read; here was his childhood bedroom; here was his workshop. Connie walked with her hands clasped at the small of her back, like a museumgoer. She was impressed by the rope handrailing and agreed it had been best to keep it in place. They stood side by side in Bob’s room and Connie said, “I suppose you think I’m going to jump right into bed with you for some wild afternoon lovemaking, is that right?” Bob turned so red that Connie thought he was choking. He’d not thought to prepare anything to eat but had made a pot of coffee, though she wanted tea. “I’ll buy tea for next time,” he said — his stab at flirtation, to reference a future meeting, as though it was understood they’d be spending time together again. They took their coffees into the backyard and sat on a mossy bench among the overgrown tangle of weeds and grasses and bushes. Connie surveyed the area with a stony face. “This garden is a disgrace. Did your mother keep it up when she was alive?”

“No, she couldn’t have been less interested.”

“And you take after her in that way?”

“I think any similarity between my mother and myself is coincidence.” The truth was that Bob had never once even considered the possibility of engaging in the act of gardening. His mind went upward then, and into the trees. Connie wore a red cable-knit sweater and gave off the just-detectable scent of rosewater. It had been raining, and the damp hung on the air, water trickling away somewhere. Connie said, “You don’t know how lucky you are to have all this space to yourself, without anyone to pester you.”

“I do know,” said Bob. “You could always move out of your father’s, though, couldn’t you?”

“I mean, I could, sure.”

“Why don’t you?”

She considered the question. “I used to fantasize about being a professional woman. The idea of a salary, and what I might buy with the money. I was going to have a purple car.”

“What kind of car?”

“Just purple. And I’d drive it to and from my job, maybe stop at the dry cleaners on the way home. I’d have an apartment somewhere, and nights I’d drink a bottle of beer at the table in the kitchenette and I’d have a record player playing. This was how it was going to look when I got away from my father. But I didn’t understand what a job really was, I don’t think. I’d only been daydreaming about the paycheck, rather than the time and effort required to earn it. At a certain point I figured out it was going to be forty years behind a desk typing up some slob’s memos for him, you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Bob said, thinking, naturally, of his mother.

“When I was a child,” Connie continued, “I’d considered my mother and father as two entities in the same caste. But then I saw that she was aging in a way that he wasn’t. He says he works for God. Fine, but he doesn’t scrub God’s toilet, while my mother scrubbed his, and now I do. She worked; I work; he doesn’t. But whereas my mother worked herself literally to death, my work will be finite.” She took a sip of coffee, then told Bob her special secret: “Mother, once, not too long before she died, explained that my father’s health is screwy.”

“Screwy how?”

“His heart in particular is very screwy, and it’s a thin-ice situation. In other words, I’ve come around to the idea that this subservience to my father is my career. I might have to work another year, or five years, but sooner or later, and not too much later, he’s going to go. My father owns his house and has money from my mother and I’m going to get it all after he dies. Then I’ll be able to do whatever I want to do, and without my father looming in every doorway like a ruiner.”

“What are the things you want to do?”

“Tiny little things, Bob. I like being in my room. I take walks and I work in the garden. I like to sew, cook. But also I want to do all the things he won’t let me do. Books, movies, television, travel, you know?”

Bob asked, as casually as he could, whether or not she had designs toward a family. She poked Bob’s side. “Kids?” she said. “I’m not so sure about that.”

“Don’t you like kids?”

“I don’t know any kids.”

“Maybe you don’t like the idea of them.”

“No, to be honest, I don’t. It’s a steep investment for a woman, with unreliable returns.” She glanced down at her watch.

“Am I boring you?”

“Shut up,” said Connie, but kindly.

“You have to go?”

“In a little bit I do. But I want to keep talking. Will you tell me about the library? Now that we’re away from there I want to know more about it.”

Bob said, “It’s a library.”

“But why are you there?”

“I want to be there. I like it there.”

“What do you like about it?”

“I like the way I feel when I’m there. It’s a place that makes sense to me. I like that anyone can come in and get the books they want for free. The people bring the books home and take care of them, then bring them back so that other people can do the same.” Bob explained about his happinesses on the quiet mornings, of his arrival at the library, the dense soundlessness of the carpeted mezzanine, and the occasional empty illuminated bus shushing by over the damp pavement.

She said, “You like being alone.”

“Being alone is normal.”

“Is it?”

“It’s normal for me.”

“Don’t you like people?”

“I don’t know any people.”

“Clever,” she said, pointing.

“I like the idea of people,” Bob said. Then, “Do you like them?”

“I do, actually.” She thought about it. “I like them on the bus, when they look out the window all lonely. I like when they count their change in their palms as the bus is pulling up. I think most people are doing the best that they can.” She shrugged, and said she’d have to leave soon, and she looked at Bob, and Bob wanted to kiss her but he didn’t know how to do it. After a while of waiting, she stood up and went back into the house and he followed her. She walked to the front door and took her coat off the peg and put it on.

“Look,” said Bob, “why don’t you let me drive you home?”

“That’s impossible. But, you can drop me down the street from the house, how about that?”

“I’ll take it,” said Bob, reaching for his coat. Soon Connie stood on the landing, watching Bob’s back while he locked up the front door. “You’re a little bit of a weirdo, aren’t you Bob?” she asked, and Bob, turning, said, “I think the truth is that we’re both weirdos, Connie.”

As with the house, she gave Bob’s vehicle a thorough going-over, opening and closing the glove box, turning the radio off and on, adjusting the volume. She rolled the window down and closed her eyes as the breeze touched her face. “It’s nice, being in a car,” she said. They crossed the river, passed the library, closed up for the day. They were a mile from Connie’s house when she became rigid in her seat. “This is far enough.”

“Why don’t you let me take you all the way?” Bob asked, but Connie grew stern and told him, “Stop this car, Bob Comet.” When he did not immediately slow down, she yanked at the steering wheel so that Bob had to pull over. The car sat idling at the curb; Bob was grinning and Connie could see that he had some mischief coming up in him. But she was unamused, and she said, “You want to see me again, is that right?”

“You bet it’s right.”

“Okay.”

“It’s really right.”

“Okay. That’s good. I like that. But you’ve got to understand about my father. It’s not some small concern and he’s not, you know, grumpy. He’s a delusional fanatic whose relationship with reality has been severed. And if it comes to his attention that I’m in any sort of romantic entanglement he is going to go berserk, okay? Berserk is the word.”

Bob said, “Has it occurred to you that he might like me?”

“He’s not going to like you.”

“Maybe he won’t like me at first but then time will pass and he’ll come to see I’m a good guy and like me against his better judgment.”

“He’s going to loathe you. He’s going to pray for the death of you.”

“Maybe he’ll weaken with time.”

“No. Bob? Listen to me. Listen to the words as I say them. Understand them. Are you listening?”

Bob looked at her mouth. “Yes.”

“He’s not going to change so long as you have any interest in me. He’s going to bar you totally from his and my areas and I wouldn’t put it past him to engage in something extreme, along the lines of violence.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “Well, what are we going to do about that?”

“We’re going to not introduce the two of you, is what we’re going to do.” Connie kissed Bob’s cheek and exited the car. Looking in at him from the sidewalk, she said, “I don’t know what more to say to you. But this is the shape of our problem. There are ways around it but not through it, and I’ll thank you to pay attention to what I tell you, right?”

“Right.”

“Thank you for the ride.”

“You’re welcome. When will I see you again?”

“Just as soon as it’s possible, obviously. I’ll let you know, okay?” Bob watched her walk away. After she was out of sight, he held up his finger and said, as if to a jury, “The young woman herself admits that the entanglement is of a romantic nature.”

MOST WEEKDAY AFTERNOONS, BOB AND ETHAN MET AT THE FINER Diner for lunch. The diner was oddly situated: when you entered you were faced with a horseshoe-shaped bank of stools screwed into the green-and-red-checked linoleum flooring. There were no other seats besides these, and no booths; in the center of the horseshoe was a sort of antistage, a sunken area where the waitress, Sally, performed her duties. The first time Ethan and Bob entered they were met with the scent of burned coffee and wet rags, an assemblage of gray-faced men looking up from their plates of beige foods, beasts at a trough. “Finer than what?” Ethan asked. None of these men answered; but Sally turned away from the cash register to look Ethan full in the face. Resting her hands on her hips, she told him, “Well, honey, I guess I’ll have to show you.”

Sally was a fascinating character in certain waitressy ways. She was of the seen-it-all variety of working human, and possessed a lusty attractiveness, this partly due to her silhouette but also the unmistakable vulgar glimmer dancing in her eyes. From the instant she first saw Ethan she gave him her every attention, which generally took the form of innuendo-heavy observational wisecracks. After Ethan ordered a patty melt, she began addressing him as Patty, not because she didn’t know his name — she had asked him that off the bat — but because she wished to establish a unique connection, and a pet name worked in favor of this. Each time Bob and Ethan entered, Sally would call out “Patty!” from wherever she stood in the room, and the lonely, unrich diner men, with their ulcers and pep pills and skull-throbbing toothaches, would turn to mark Ethan’s response. These men longed for nicknames from Sally, but Sally was beyond their grasp, just as Ethan was beyond hers. Five years earlier and she probably could have conquered him, if briefly; but now there was not a chance. She didn’t love Ethan, she knew almost nothing of his life or personality, but craved his attention as a representative of youth and virility, and in homage to what her social currency once had been. Her own youth was only just cooling off, she seemed to be saying to him; and when she called him Patty, then she must have felt some reverberation from those sleeker, wilder days. Ethan feigned obliviousness at the attention Sally paid him, behaving neutrally, never in an unfriendly fashion, but never reciprocating the advances even slightly, which would have sent the wrong signal. “Cruel to be kind?” Bob asked, and Ethan touched a finger to the tip of his flawless nose.

A day came where the diner was all but empty and Bob decided he would talk to Ethan about Connie, and sex, and the idea of sex with Connie, and the fact that he’d not had sex before. He’d come close, once in the eleventh grade, and then again in college, but he felt no true connection with either girl, and so close had been close enough. He’d begun to think of himself as one who could and would live without experiencing carnal relations, when here was Connie, and while he couldn’t say for certain, she did seem to want something more of Bob than was the norm according to his circumscribed experience. She’d visited Bob’s house three times by this point, but they’d never shared a proper kiss, even. Intercourse was as sheer an event as murder, to Bob’s mind; how could he do such a thing with Connie? After they placed their orders, Bob stated his position and named his concerns. Ethan said nothing until after Bob had finished, when he asked, “Has it occurred to you she might want you to do it?”

“It’s occurred to me,” said Bob. “I guess it feels far-fetched.”

Ethan spoke of a need for action in terms that were not crude for the sake of crudeness but which did not account for Bob’s sense of reverence. “I don’t know this girl, obviously,” Ethan was saying, “but in my experience, I’ve never met a young person, male or female, who didn’t enjoy fucking a partner of their choosing.” Bob felt a flash of anger at the use of vulgarity in such proximity to Connie and said, for the first time, “Now, look, I’m in love with this girl.” Ethan was startled by Bob’s declaration; his expression cycled from an amusement to a sudden kindness, then into a sheepishness or shyness. He said, “Well, that’s something else, then, Bob. I really wouldn’t know much about things like that. So maybe it’s true that I’m out of my depth, but my understanding is that love and fucking go together pretty well. This young lady is flesh and blood and bone, and while it’s possible she doesn’t ever wish to be made love to in her lifetime, it does appear to me that you’re doing her a disservice by putting her on whatever pedestal you’re putting her on. Here, let’s ask Sally. Hey, Sally?”

Sally was setting their plates on the counter. “Yes?”

“What we’re after is some worldly advice, do you mind?”

“Could not mind less.”

“Thanks. Well, Sally, it’s news to me, but I’ve just discovered that my buddy here is head over heels in love.”

“Is that right? Well, hell, congratulations. That’s a great thing.” Sally was petting Bob’s hand, and her smile was genuine.

Ethan said, “But, wait, there’s a problem. So enamored is he that he believes his paramour is too good for the act of love.”

“Ah, one of those,” said Sally, and she shook her head, as if she’d seen the detail coming. “Oh, brother.”

“But what do we say to him?” Ethan asked.

Sally told Bob, “I’ll say it only once, and you can take it or leave it. Understand, though, I’m speaking to you honestly and with all good wishes for you and your little sweetie, all right?”

“All right,” said Bob.

“You listening to me?”

“Yes.”

Sally looked hard into Bob’s eyes. “Even the unsoiled and snow-white dove wants to get nailed to the wall every now and then.”

“See?” said Ethan.

“Am I right or am I right?” Sally asked.

“You’re right. She’s right.”

It can’t be said that Bob gave very much consideration to the advice he’d received from Sally and Ethan that day; but perhaps it wasn’t mere coincidence that Connie and Bob consummated their alliance on their very next date. Her father had been experiencing a shortness of breath and had gone into the hospital overnight for observation and so Connie was free, for the first time since Bob had met her, for twenty-four hours. They had not explicitly discussed her spending the night, but she arrived at Bob’s house with a suspiciously large shoulder bag, which Bob noticed and was noticed noticing. They ate spaghetti and split a bottle of wine and afterward walked about the neighborhood. Bob pointed at a fire hydrant. “Tripped and smashed my head against that one time. Eight years old. Blood all over the place.” The streetlights clicked on as they climbed the steps to the house; once inside, Connie simply continued climbing steps, up to Bob’s bedroom. He followed behind and after some grappling they lay down to succumb to friendly tradition. It was not a lengthy exercise. Afterward Bob lay there thinking his happy, foolish thoughts. He was a fornicator now, and everything suddenly was good. Bob explained about his never having done it before, and Connie was plainly moved to have been his first. When she did not make the same claim as Bob, however, then he had to wonder why. A coldness came over him; knowing he should not ask, he did ask if Connie was a virgin and discovered she’d made love to three other men prior to Bob. She called the men guys. The word was sharp and wounding to Bob; when he asked what she meant in using it, she said,

“What do you mean, what do I mean?”

“I mean, I’m assuming these were kids from your school, or what?”

“No, Bob, I told you, the boys at school were so awful. I couldn’t think of them in that way at all.”

“Then who were they?”

“Just some guys.”

Bob’s entire body stiffened in the bed. His eyes were shut up tight and Connie, lying on her side, chin resting in her palm, watched him. “I’m not going to talk about it if you’re going to make it into a big deal.”

“I’m not. It’s not. It feels like it is but I know it’s not.”

“It’s not for me,” said Connie.

“Right,” said Bob. “I understand.” He knew it wasn’t in his personal interest, but he couldn’t help himself and had to ask for details of the events. Nothing graphic, he clarified, just the soft pencil sketch; Connie agreed to give him what he thought he wanted. “Guy number one,” she said, “a carpenter replacing the tread on the stairwell to the basement. He was in his early forties, sleepy, friendly, big belly, divorced. That my father would leave us alone together should give you an idea of the man’s looks and status. This was not Gary Cooper, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“Weeks before I’d made up my mind to get the whole business over with, and that the next time I had the chance, I’d take it. Well, here it was. So I put on some lipstick and brought the guy a piece of toast, which I watched him eat, and after, I asked, ‘How was the toast?’ ‘Very good,’ he said. I asked him if he was attracted to me and he put on his glasses and squinted. ‘Sure,’ he said. I asked him if he wanted to come to my room and he looked at his watch.” Connie winked luxuriously. “He was sweet, actually. I mean, he wasn’t a pig or anything, and he was physically clean, which was nice. But the act itself was pretty sad. After, he stood at the foot of my bed, staring at the walls of my room. He had this huge, fleshy back with love handles, but a tiny little ruby-red ass, like a ten-year-old boy who’d just been spanked. And there he was, looking at my diploma, my drawings of ponies and fairies, and he said, ‘I shouldn’t have done this.’ He got dressed and I put on my robe and walked him to the door. We shook hands, and he said, a second time, ‘I shouldn’t have done this.’ I never saw him again. Not that I was hoping to. And that was guy number one.

“Guy number two was the manager at the supermarket. He’d been chatty with me since the tenth grade. After I came of age and graduated, he started flirting in a sort of reckless way. And I had the feeling he knew I’d done it, right, with the carpenter. Not knew-knew, but knew on the caveman level, and that was interesting to me. I noticed he was wearing a ring and said ‘I can see you’re married,’ and he told me, ‘But barely, barely.’ That made me laugh. And I figured, I already did it the once, what’s the difference? I guess I was hoping it would be more fulfilling than the first time in terms of, you know, the physical sensations. But it was exactly the same as with the carpenter.”

Bob said, “And where did this happen?”

“With the supermarket guy?”

“Yes.”

“At the supermarket.”

“Where in the supermarket?”

“Romeo had a cot in his office. I call him Romeo because that was his name — that was the name on his name tag. And it looked like he was living in that office of his, so maybe he was telling the truth about being barely married.”

Bob said, “What about the third guy.”

“The third guy was a cop.”

Bob held up his hand. He had heard enough and wished to hear no more. And he had no defense besides immaturity but he behaved with petulance that night, seized by jealousy, an emotion he’d hardly known before, but that now possessed him entirely. Connie placated him for a time, as much as she cared to, but soon she’d had enough of it and fell asleep. When Bob finally slept himself, his dreams were cuckold narratives, and he woke up with his upper body falling fully out of the bed. Connie still was sleeping; as Bob watched her face, he recognized the smallness of his behaviors and took hold of his emotions, waking Connie up to apologize to her. She welcomed him back with congratulations and assurances of her uncommon affections for him in particular, and again they succumbed to friendly tradition and again it was expedient but Bob told her he would soon become an expert love-maker and Connie said that she was certain it was so and that she was supportive of every manner of self-improvement.

Days later, and Bob and Connie were riding a bus together. They had no destination but were riding to ride, Connie attempting to show Bob what it was she liked about public transportation. In this she failed, or perhaps the failure was Bob’s, but he never managed to achieve even a minor affection for the bus-riding act, which isn’t to say he wasn’t enjoying himself at this particular moment. By now they were immersed in their affinity for one another and their future was open before them. It was a time of sterling certitude and grand plans, a kingdom coming into focus through the lens of a telescope, and they were riding in silence across the southwest quadrant of the city, holding hands and gazing out the window in the dreamy way lovers sometimes did and do. Bob noticed an Italian eatery called Three Guys Pizza; he pointed and told Connie, “Look, there’s your favorite restaurant.” Connie read the sign and turned to Bob and was about to give voice to her response when the man across the aisle, a ruddy duffer in a tweed cap and London Fog trench coat, leaned over and asked Connie, “Excuse me miss, did I hear correctly that you’re a fan of the pizzeria we just passed?” Bob said, “Oh, she’s a very passionate fan of that pizzeria, sir. You should hear all the things she has to say about Three Guys.” The duffer was impressed; he shook his head smartly to the side and issued a brief, sharp outbreath. Dinging the bell, he stood to exit. “I live nearby, you see,” he explained. “And I love a good recommendation. Citizen to citizen, like in the animal kingdom — birds telling other birds what’s coming their way, from one treetop to the next.” The man flung up his tall collar, cinched his belt, and was away. Bob turned to Connie to communicate his surprise at the unexpected poetry of the moment. She still was watching Bob, not in a friendly or unfriendly way, but levelly. She had been holding on to her response during the duffer’s interruption; now she passed it off for Bob to hold: “It’s four guys including you, sweetheart. Four guys and counting.”

ONE NIGHT, AFTER STAYING TOO LATE AT HIS APARTMENT, AND AFTER having drunk two too many fruit jars of wine, Bob laid himself out on Ethan’s itchy green couch and made to pass his night there. He’d been asleep some hours when there came a knock at the door. Ethan crossed the room in his underwear to answer; he led a heavily perfumed female figure through the darkness and back into his bedroom. According to the noises made by the visitor, their communications were successful on a scale Bob could not fathom; which is to say that he truly did not understand what was going on in that room. He stared at the ceiling and waited for the noises to end. He smoked a cigarette, then lit a second off the first. When the duo at last achieved finale and completion, the noiselessness was so sudden and total, it was to Bob a noise in itself, and there came from somewhere deep in the building a round of applause, neighbors of Ethan’s who were likely used to such sounds emanating from the apartment. In the morning Bob had a headache fashioned by the wine but also confusion, envy. He brewed a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Ethan and the woman to emerge from the bedroom, but then Ethan entered by the front door, alone, and with a pink box of pastries under his arm. “Good morning!” he said.

“Morning,” said Bob. “Where’s your screaming, agreeing friend?”

“She went home hours ago.” Ethan poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table, waiting for the interrogation that he knew had to come. “So,” Bob began. With this one word he was saying many things. He was saying, So this is your life. He was saying, So that’s the way lovemaking sounds for you. He was saying, I don’t recognize those sounds in regards to my own lovemaking. He was saying, Is it all as nice for you as it seems?

“Yeah,” Ethan answered.

“But, who is she?”

“A woman I know.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“On the street.”

“What?”

Ethan opened up the pink pastry box and perused its contents. “It was during a carless time of mine, and I was sitting at a bus stop on Broadway when she pulled up in a new Pontiac to ask me directions to the Rose Garden. She had Oregon plates and frankly, I didn’t think she needed directions in the first place. ‘All right,’ I told her, ‘you’ve got so much free time on your hands, why don’t you give me a ride home?’ That appeared to be what she was thinking about, anyway. And I hadn’t meant it meanly, but she took offense, or pretended to take offense. Then my bus came and I got on. I forgot about her, but when I got off at my stop, there was the Pontiac again. ‘Excuse me, young man,’ she said.” Ethan selected a pastry and took a bite, catching the crumbs with his free hand.

“And then what happened?”

“She said she supposed she was going my way after all. I got in her car and she drove me home.”

“Then what?”

Ethan raised and lowered and raised and lowered his eyebrows.

Bob said, “Right off the bat?”

“Yep.”

“Was this in the daytime?”

“Yep.”

“And when was that?”

“End of last winter.”

“How often do you see her?”

“Every couple weeks she shows up. There’s no schedule; it’s all down to her. I don’t even have her phone number.” Ethan pushed the pink box toward Bob but Bob couldn’t focus on anything other than the discussion at hand.

“But who is she?” he asked again.

“I really can’t tell you, Bob. I mean, that’s a part of the whole deal. I know her first name is Pearl, and I know she’s rich, and that she’s married, though she acts like she’s not — takes her ring off before coming up. Okay, fine. She wants to pretend about certain things and I’m comfortable with that. She told me once, ‘The first time you ask me for money, Ethan, you’ll never see me again.’ Can you top that? She’s always chasing after the upper hand, and I let her think she’s got it, but she never will — not really she won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I truly don’t care if she never comes back.”

“But you welcome her when she does.”

“Welcome her is a bit much. I don’t turn her away, though, it’s true.”

“I think she probably felt welcome last night,” Bob observed.

Ethan bowed in his seat. He took another bite of his pastry. “As time goes by, I think of my visits with Pearl, and the Pearls of the world, as practice. Because someday, buddy, I’m going to fall in love too, just like you. And when I do, that woman will be doted on to within an inch of her life.” When Bob said the scenario felt a little dark or heartless to him, Ethan said he was giving the whole thing too much credence. “Really, it’s just a small courtesy she and I are doing for one another, like holding the elevator open for a stranger.” He patted the pink box. “These sticky buns are excellent, Bob.”

Bob sat there smoking his cigarette and drinking his coffee and watching his friend and considering the vast differences of their respective experience. He hadn’t yet introduced Connie to Ethan, but it was only now that he admitted to himself he’d been intentionally keeping them apart. It wasn’t that he believed Connie would, against her own free will and faithfulness, swoon over Ethan for his profile and charisma; and neither did Bob think Ethan would utilize his tools to woo Connie away from him. His fear, or fearful belief, was that Connie and Ethan would both, upon meeting each other, come to learn and understand that they were true mates, truer than Connie and Bob could ever be. It felt paranoiac, but also commonsensible, true enough in its potential. For the first time in his life, Bob had love and friendship both, and all he had to do to maintain this was nothing at all. Thirty minutes later he sat out front of Ethan’s apartment in the idling Chevy, and the danger of it was clear and vivid: he mustn’t ever let them meet, he told himself. He would not let them meet.

THE SITUATION WITH CONNIE’S FATHER EVOLVED. CONNIE ARRIVED AT the library an hour after Bob came on shift, her face swollen and raw from crying. “Good morning, I’ve made an error.” The night before she had approached her father with news of her relationship with Bob and it had not been well received.

Bob said, “Wasn’t the plan to not tell him?”

“It was, but then I did, because I’m an idiot.” She touched her face. “Am I a mess or am I a mess?”

“You’re a little bit of a mess.”

She sighed. “I was trying to eat my cereal but he wouldn’t stop shouting, so I left.”

“I thought you said you told him last night?”

“Yes, he was shouting then too. Finally he went to sleep and I thought the shouting was over but when he woke up it started all over again. And I’m not sure what to say other than he’s insane, and that I really am an idiot, and I don’t know what we’re going to do.” She retired to the restroom to cry awhile longer. After, she and Bob sat together in the break room to discuss what they might do about the situation. Bob understood they were at a crossroads of some kind, and a rare boldness possessed him and he put forth the idea that she shouldn’t go home at all, but stay at his house instead.

“What does that mean, ‘stay’? Stay for how long?”

“For however long you want. For forever.”

“What about the will?”

“What about it?”

“He says if I see you anymore he’s going to cut off my inheritance. The money, the house, everything.”

“Do you think he means it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, even if he does mean it, we don’t really need anything from your father at all, do we? I have a house. I have money.”

Connie looked confused, almost annoyed. “I’m sorry, what are you telling me?” she asked. “Are you proposing?”

“Do you want me to?”

“I guess I do.”

“You guess you do.”

“I do.”

“Okay, I’m proposing.”

“Okay, propose.”

“Will you marry me?”

“You’re supposed to get down on a knee to propose.”

Bob got down on both knees. “Will you marry me?”

Miss Ogilvie had walked in at the point preceding Bob’s question; before Connie could answer, she said, “Personal business elsewhere, Bob, thank you.” She exited the room and Bob came up from his knees and led Connie outside. She said nothing about the question of marriage but agreed that Bob should pick her up that night, and that she would stay with him at least until the situation calmed or became clearer, and they worked over the details while waiting for Connie’s bus.

At 11:55 p.m., Bob parked the Chevy across the street from Connie’s father’s house and cut the engine. The streetlight angled across the hood of the car, bisecting his torso; he held his wristwatch under the light to follow the sweep of the second hand. The street was quiet other than the ticking of the car. Midnight occurred and Bob stared at Connie’s second-story bedroom window. His heart thrilled when he saw that it was slowly opening; but then it became stuck in its casing, and Connie shut the window to try again. Suddenly the window shot up with a loud bang which set off the barking of area dogs. When the barking died away, Connie’s hand emerged from her darkened bedroom, and two suitcases came to rest on the roof above the porch. Bob exited the Chevy and slunk across the street and up the front yard to stand at the predetermined point of contact. Connie crept along, cases in hand; she tossed these to Bob, then knelt down and hop-dropped off the roof. Her skirt shot up and Bob noticed, for he couldn’t not, that she wasn’t wearing any underwear — a curious detail, but there was no time to consider it just then, as Connie landed on the grass, performing an impressive and unanticipateable paratrooper’s forward somersault. Bob helped her stand and took up her suitcases and together they hurried across the street to the Chevy. As Connie sat, she realized she wasn’t wearing underwear. “I’m not wearing any underwear!” she said, and Bob replied that yes, he had noticed, and so Connie suffered a short period of mortification. She explained she’d only just woken up and had dressed herself so quickly that she’d forgotten about her bottoms, as she called them. She said she was sorry for the visual, if the visual had been bothersome, and Bob told her it hadn’t been and could never be, and besides that it was dark, and he was having a fun, funny time. He was a young librarian living through an adventure of love and his scandalized sweetheart was falling through the sky without underwear on and the Chevy’s glasspacks were burbling reasonably in the summer night in Oregon. Bob drove across the river; the windows were down and the water gave off a coolness that poured into the car. Connie’s hair was twirling up and up; she had what could be described as an amorous expression on her face.

“I will marry you, Monsieur Bob.”

NINE DAYS LATER, CONNIE’S FATHER DROPPED DEAD WHILE WATERING the lawn out front of his house. Connie had left Bob’s number with a neighbor-confidante, and now the neighbor rang up to share the news on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Bob lay on the sofa looking down the hall at Connie standing in the kitchen and talking on the phone; she wore a white apron and held a long wooden spoon in her hand and she was nodding, and the spoon was also nodding, in the style of a conductor’s baton keeping time. “All right. Yes. Fine. Thank you.” She set the phone in its cradle. “My father’s dead,” she called, then returned to the stove to stir the soup. Bob moved to the kitchen and came up behind her to hold her about the waist, but she was behaving frostily and so he steered back to the sofa. A voice told Bob he should let her be; after dinner, after she’d thought of it, she calmly told Bob that, while her father was not a bad man, he was a foolish one, foolish and bad-minded, and she’d decided she didn’t want anything to do with his remains because he’d have enjoyed her discomfort in the face of them, and she refused to give him that final satisfaction. Bob said, “Remains.” Connie explained, “I’m supposed to go to the coroner and funeral parlor, sign off on the arrangements. Well, I won’t do it.” She was recalling all the little indignities she and her mother had suffered under her father’s vanity over the years and these memories were sitting poorly with her. Her anger was a healthy response, and Bob, unfond of the man himself, understood it, but he didn’t like to see her graciousness marred in this way; also, he thought she might regret her behavior later. When Bob proposed that he take care of the arrangements, Connie told him, “You don’t want to do that,” and this was true, he didn’t, but he said he thought he should do it anyway, unless she felt so strongly about it that she was prohibiting him from taking part. “I’ve never prohibited in my life, and I’m not about to start now,” she said.

Bob was tasked with identifying the body at the coroner’s ahead of its transportation to the funeral parlor, and he took the morning off work so that he could attend to this. The coroner was a friendly, unhealthy man; he led Bob to a broad white-tiled room with a single window casting a beam of sunlight over a gurney, upon which lay a body draped by a sheet. As they crossed over to meet the figure, the coroner explained to Bob that he had performed an autopsy on the corpse earlier that same morning. This was not the norm for a death by natural causes but had been done according to the express demand of the deceased. “The funeral parlor had a letter written by Mr. Coleman on file, which they passed off to me yesterday, in keeping with Mr. Coleman’s orders. It was a little confusing to follow, but the gist was that the gentleman was phobic of murder by poison, and wanted someone to check him out postfact.”

“Who did he think was going to poison him?” asked Bob.

“Well, the Vatican, is the short answer. The longer answer points to a group of priests living in the Forest Park area who Mr. Coleman believed had it in for him. The letter paints a clear picture of mental instability but I went ahead with the procedure, to be a sport.”

“And was he poisoned?”

“He was not. His heart was faulty, and no sign of foul play whatsoever. One thing I will say that was unusual: this man had the lungs and liver of a nineteen-year-old boy. All shiny and clean like they’d never been used.” When Bob explained about Connie’s father’s beliefs, the coroner said, “Yes, you could see he’d never taken a drink or a smoke. I suppose they tell themselves the lack is worth it. Personally, I’m happy as a clam to lose the fifteen years.” Connie’s father’s letter had prompted a curiosity in the coroner, who asked Bob roundaboutly, almost apologetically, what the situation of the man’s death had been. Bob spoke of Connie’s father’s unhappiness about the pending marriage of his daughter.

“And you’re the groom-to-be?”

“That’s right.”

The coroner made the noise of understanding. “The so-called broken heart is the heart stilled by romantic disappointment or some other great loss — death of a child, say. And while the phenomenon does from time to time occur, death by sorrow is highly uncommon. What is far more common is death by bitterness, outrage — pique. It sounds to me that this man died from pique.” As he spoke he began rolling back the sheet to expose Connie’s father’s corpse. There was a staged effect to this which brought to Bob’s mind the magician’s elegance of gesture: voilà.

“Is this your man?”

“That’s him.”

The coroner watched Bob making his survey of the deceased, the light of curiosity still glowing in his eyes. Bob gamely explained his dislike of Connie’s father, naming all of his shortcomings and awfulnesses. Bob was becoming impassioned in his critique when he caught himself and smiled at the coroner, who was listening with evident interest and enjoyment. Bob said, “You must hear all sorts of sordid family gossip in your line.”

“All sorts, yes. I’m not really supposed to say it, but the truth is that it’s a fascinating position.” He went about covering Connie’s father back up. In a wistful voice he said, “Really, though, you should have seen this man’s liver and lungs. They were right off the assembly line, new in the box.”

When Bob got home the radio was on but Connie wasn’t in the house. He found her in the backyard, digging up weeds. She’d outfitted herself in some old clothes of Bob’s, and she told him, “Just you wait. I’m going to make this garbage dump into something special.” Bob sat on the patchy grass, watching her as she worked and waiting for her to ask after his visit to the coroner’s. When she didn’t ask, Bob told her he’d be glad to discuss his experience if she wished him to; but, she said she didn’t care to hear of it. She thanked Bob for his assistance, and Bob told her, “You’re welcome.” There was no funeral service and the whereabouts of the ashes remained a mystery. Six weeks after Bob had viewed the corpse a lawyer sent a letter to Connie explaining she would receive nothing from her father’s estate. But she’d already known and accepted this, and so the letter held no weight of consequence with her. Bob watched as she deposited the letter, with comical care, into the trash can under the kitchen sink. Her face read of unaffected amusement, and he loved her very dearly.

THE PROBLEM WITH KEEPING ETHAN AND CONNIE SEPARATED WAS that they both came to the library regularly. First there were the close calls, with Connie leaving just before Ethan’s arrival, or vice versa. Then there was the unhappy instant of the both of them being in the library simultaneously, only each wasn’t aware of the other’s presence, and Bob said nothing about it, and so they somehow avoided commingling. But then one day at the Information desk, early in the evening and to Bob’s ripe horror, Connie and Ethan came into the library together, and Ethan was guiding her by her elbow, and they were laughing. They approached and stood before Bob, presenting themselves; Ethan did not let go of Connie’s arm; Connie’s face was flushed with pleasure. Bob instructed himself to play along, to mimic their mischievous gladness, but the unpleasant surprise he knew was so thorough that the best he could do was offer up a blank look. “What happened?” he asked.

“Do you want to tell him?” Ethan asked Connie.

“I’ll tell him.”

“Tell him if you want to tell him,” Ethan said.

“Let me tell him.” Connie spoke to Bob while looking at Ethan: “Well,” she said. “I was riding the bus and minding nobody’s business but my own when I realized the man across the aisle was staring at me. And everyone likes to be stared at from time to time, but after a while I’d had enough of it and asked him, you know, to please stop. And he did stop — for about three and a half seconds. But then he’s back to staring and I’m starting to get a little worried, because for all I know I’m dealing with an active pervert, and so I’m looking around for another seat to sit in but there aren’t any, and finally I take out my book and start reading, or pretending to read, because this way he can see that I’m busy and not interested, right? So a minute goes by, and now I’m really reading, and I’ve pretty much forgotten about the pervert peeper across the aisle when he reaches over and he taps his finger on the open page of my book. And when I look up he’s all leaned over, his face serious, and he says to me—”

“You’re not telling it right,” said Ethan.

“I’m not? Sure I am.”

Ethan told Bob, “She’s not telling it right.”

“Why don’t you tell it, then,” Connie said.

“Okay, I will.” Ethan took a minute to locate himself. “Well, look Bob,” he said, “I was staring at her. And I’m sorry. But when I got on the bus I noticed her sitting there all upright and prim, and how could I not stare. And I was staring for the normal boy-girl reasons but there was also another reason underneath the normal ones, which was that there was something funny about this person, some sort of question hanging in the air around her. Had I met her before, or seen her somewhere else? There was just this… thing about her, but I couldn’t place it. Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a book, and I see that it’s a library book. And not just any library book but Crime and Punishment. And not just any copy of Crime and Punishment, but the very same one I had checked out, with the title smudged and the stain on the spine. And the minute I saw that, then the mystery was solved because I knew absolutely who she was.”

“And he leaned over and he said to me—”

“Let me tell it. It’s my punch line. I leaned over and said to her, ‘You’re Connie, and I’m Ethan, and I think we need to have a discussion, because we’re both in love with the same man, and I can’t go on sharing him like this.’”

The pair resumed laughing, and here Bob wished to vanish, or for Ethan to vanish, or Connie, or all three of them. He also wished Ethan and Connie would stop enjoying each other, and he strongly wished Ethan would take his hand off her elbow. Connie’s laughter trailed away, and now she was watching Bob with a crooked, curious expression. “What’s the matter, honey?” she asked, and Bob answered that he was fine, just that it had been a long day.

Ethan and Connie decided they should all three go out to dinner, and they waited together on the sidewalk outside while Bob began the process of shutting the library down. He stole glances out the window as he righted the chairs and turned off the lights; Connie was laughing again, and she and Ethan were standing close to one another. Bob locked the door and walked down the path toward the sidewalk. Connie was facing away from him but Ethan looked up as Bob approached. When he saw Bob, his smile faded and his face softened into a look of concern, or kindness, as if he suddenly understood that Bob was in pain, and why. Bob felt an ache of shame but wished to keep it private.

It was a cold walk on hard concrete. Connie was positioned in between Bob and Ethan, and she did not take Bob’s arm as was usual, but walked alone and independent of him. When he felt he couldn’t stand it, he took her hand in his, but she quickly removed it and put it in her pocket. By the time they arrived at the restaurant, Ethan wasn’t behaving as before. He was quieter, almost formal as he asked about their wedding plans, and whether or not they would honeymoon, and would they have children, and how many? It made for poor conversation, and Connie tried to lead Ethan back to himself by asking teasing questions: How long had he been a masher on buses? And what was his success rate? Was there honor among mashers? If he got on a bus to mash, for example, and found another masher already onboard, did he then exit the bus to give his mashing peer room to work without competition? When this line failed to get a rise, Connie made to engage Ethan in some banter against Bob, but Ethan would only praise Bob’s influence, declarations of admiration that Bob felt were rooted in pity.

Altogether the meal was, for Bob, a spectacle of emotional discomfort. At its conclusion Ethan snatched the bill out of the surprised waiter’s hand and made a play at casual largesse by paying for the dinner, though he was broke, and Bob knew he was broke. After Ethan had hurried off and gone, the silence he left behind was a wretched creature, and Bob couldn’t tell where his insecurity ended and the factual dreadfulness began. He and Connie walked back to the library, and the Chevy; all the way home, they spoke hardly a word to one another. Entering the house, Connie said she was sorry his friend hadn’t liked her. When Bob asked her what she meant she said, “First he’s as friendly as a puppy, right? Then at dinner he hardly says a thing to me other than to grunt, and God forbid he should look me in the eye.”

“He felt shy, maybe.”

“Not before dinner he wasn’t. And on the bus he was the least shy man I’ve ever met in my life. Anyway, why would he become shy around me? Didn’t you say he’s some kind of playboy?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I just mean that I’m plain.”

“No, you’re not. But what does the way you look have to do with Ethan?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Bob, stop.” She busied herself taking off her coat and hanging it on the peg in the hall. She stood watching the wall. “I want your friend to like me, okay? It’s important to me that he and I get along.” Bob didn’t take his coat off. He walked upstairs and lay down on top of the comforter, listening to Connie making the usual house-at-night noises downstairs: water on and off, back door open and shut, lights clicking off. Bob hadn’t named his concern, but by the way he was behaving it must have been obvious he had again been overtaken by a jealousy. He felt he was making himself unattractive, but no matter how he approached it he couldn’t think of a way to force the jealousy to cease. As he lay there squirming in his unhappiness, he became aware that Connie’s house-at-night noises were growing more pronounced — she was banging and clattering things around in the kitchen with more force than was necessary. Bob listened with care and interest — yes, she was definitely expressing an anger. Bob thought she had considered the source of his concern, translated it, and now knew a sense of insult, which rather than bringing Bob to a place of remorse or sorrow made him soothed and hopeful. Was it not likely, after all, that Connie’s anger meant she didn’t recognize Bob’s fear as plausible, or even possible? As the banging and clattering grew louder, so did Bob’s relief grow. When Connie came upstairs she was stomping her feet and cursing under her breath and Bob was more or less thrilled. She took an angry shower and got into her pajamas angrily, punching her feet through the leg holes; she sat down hard on the edge of the bed and glared at Bob, who calmly explained that he loved her so much it had made him a little bit crazy that night, and that he was very sorry if he had insulted her, or insulted their life. It was a process for them to arrive at a place where Connie forgave him, but after, late in the night, Bob took her hand in his, and she didn’t pull away from him. In the morning Bob issued a warning to himself. He hadn’t understood the fallibility of their pact; now he saw that it was not a permanent structure but something that had to be cared for and tended to. He was afraid of what he’d done and by the way he’d behaved and he told himself that the only way forward was to believe in what he and Connie had made and to protect it.

There followed a period of four or five weeks where Bob heard no word from Ethan; and neither did Bob contact him. Bob was glad for them to take the break, but also bothered by it, because it seemed to confirm his fears. Twice through the course of the month Connie asked after Ethan, and both times she was playing toward a casualness, but Bob disliked that she was considering him at all. He told himself he was willing to forgo the friendship with Ethan if it meant he didn’t have to feel so badly as before; but really, it was more complicated than that. At some points during this lull he missed Ethan terribly, and he thought of the pair of them walking up the sidewalk at night, and they’d had three of four drinks each and were talking volubly, oblivious to all but the thoughts and considerations they passed back and forth, huddling against the cold. For the rest of his life, whenever Bob thought of his former alliance with Ethan, this was the scenario that came to mind: the two of them hurrying along, talking over one another and laughing, cigarette smoke pooling in their wake. Where were they going in such a rush as that? And what were they discussing with such enthusiasm?

From the start of their friendship Bob had wondered who Ethan was when they were apart, but it happened only once that he caught a glimpse of Ethan in his element. It was a foggy morning and Bob was reading the newspaper at the Information desk when a car pulled up across the street, a rattling junker filled with young men and women, loud and jeering, 7:15 a.m. Ethan sat in the backseat, crammed in with the rest; he made to exit the car but as he stepped on the sidewalk the hands of his friends reached up and pulled him back in. This happened twice more before he finally broke free, the collar of his T-shirt stretched out, his hair yanked up in a shock, and he stood facing his fellows, bowing grandly as balled trash rained down on his skull and shoulders. When the car puttered away Ethan disappeared up the steps and to his apartment. Bob returned to his paper but the text was elusive to him, and he could think only of Ethan’s gloriously shambling homecoming.

Forty-five minutes later Ethan walked into the library. He’d showered and changed and combed his hair, and he offered a calm good morning greeting before making a sober appraisal of the latest books Bob had recommended to him. He didn’t mention anything about his late night; Bob understood by this that Ethan thought of him as a serious person, someone he might learn from or better himself by, but one who might not need to hear all the details of his social life. This was not unflattering, but there was also some part of Bob that wished he could have been in that rattling car, coming home when most are waking up, after a full night spent in what had to have been the most thorough and joyful kind of sin. What did Ethan see in Bob, then? Was Bob exotic in his plainness? Was he merely a straight man for Ethan? How had it happened that these two people should become friends? Connie believed it was important that someone as isolated as Bob not abandon his one friendship, which was logical, sound; but he did nothing to bridge the gap and had accepted that the era of his having a male companion had passed. Finally, though, Ethan came to see Bob at the library. He wore a tailored suit and overcoat, his hair was cut short, he was tanned, and he had a puzzled expression on his face. At his side there stood an attractive, elegant young woman whom he introduced as his fiancée, and that her name was Eileen.

EILEEN WAS NOT CHARMING BUT HAD CONTEMPLATED CHARM AND could perform a version of it that was convincing so long as you didn’t inspect it very closely. She was not shy, was not capable of shyness, and she did not seem to be in possession of a sense of humor; at any rate she was not funny on purpose. Ethan stood by watching as his fiancée communicated with his friend, and the puzzled expression that had read on his face when he’d entered the library remained. He wasn’t unhappy; he had the look of a man unsure of his location. Eileen was saying to Bob, “We came here to invite you out to dinner tonight.”

“You and Connie both,” Ethan added.

“That’s why we came here,” Eileen said.

Bob explained that he and Connie had plans for dining in with their neighbors that night, but invited Ethan and Eileen to join the group, and he named a time, and that they needn’t bring anything other than themselves. After the couple left the library, Bob telephoned Connie to tell her the news.

“Well,” said Connie, “what’s this fiancée like? I suppose she’s very beautiful.”

“Yes,” Bob said.

“And in the personality department?”

“She doesn’t give a lot of clues about that.”

“Still waters, maybe.”

“Maybe not,” Bob said. Connie was evidently happy at this attack on Eileen’s personality, and Bob began to dread the thought of the dinner and he moved slowly toward it with a foot-dragging petulance. When he arrived at home, Connie was upstairs getting ready for the evening. She was humming a jazzy tune, and when she came downstairs Bob saw that she was wearing makeup, a fancier-than-normal dress, and heeled shoes. Before he could catch himself, he asked, “Why are you all dressed up?” Connie stood up straight to let her disappointment shine, then said, “Bob, if you think I’m not going to make myself look nice to meet your best friend and his fiancée, then I don’t know what to tell you other than that you should consider going and fucking yourself.” Which was fair enough, after all; and the words had the effect of a splash of cold water on Bob’s face. He apologized and Connie accepted the apology and together they set the dining room table.

Ethan and Eileen arrived thirty minutes early. Bob was getting dressed upstairs when he heard the doorbell; he came down to find Connie and Eileen standing face-to-face and making their greetings while Ethan lurked to the side, wearing another tailored suit, and staring blankly at Bob. He made a drink gesture, and Bob made a follow me gesture, and they moved to the kitchen, where Bob poured them each a tumbler of whiskey. Ethan bolted his, and said, “Thanks, I needed that.” He held out his glass for a refill, which Bob gave him, and which he again drank down. “Thanks, I needed that.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Bob.

“Nothing. No, something. It’s hard to say. I’ll admit to a degree of disorientation, but that’s as far as I’ll go right now. Let’s talk about something else, maybe.”

“All right,” said Bob. “Why are you so tan and how many suits do you have now?”

“I’ve been in Acapulco and I’ve got seven suits.”

“Why were you in Acapulco and why do you have seven suits?”

“I was working as a waiter in a resort there; Eileen’s family has a tailor.”

“Why did Eileen’s family’s tailor make you seven suits?”

“It was my idea that I should have a suit, for the wedding. But Eileen said that every man should have seven, and I went along with that, because why wouldn’t I.”

“Who’s paying the tailor?”

“The father, I think.”

“What does he do?”

“Something with boats.”

“Shipping?”

“Anyway there are ships. Maybe it’s that he builds them. I can’t get to the bottom of it because it’s hard to talk to Eileen’s father because he’s such a hateable little pigman.”

“And what does he think of you?”

“Not so much, buddy. But he says he’s not that worried about me because he’s met my type before and that we always come to a bad end.” Ethan shrugged, as if to say that time would tell. Bob corked the whiskey bottle and he and Ethan went in search of Connie and Eileen and found them seated at the dining room table, and they were drinking red wine and Eileen was saying, “Ethan was our waiter at the resort. And he was not very good at recalling our orders or bringing us what we wanted in a timely style, but he was good at seducing me, which he did without any sort of shame whatever, and in broad daylight, isn’t that right, Ethan?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Ethan answered.

“Wait,” Connie said. “I’ve missed a detail or two. How is it that Ethan was working in a resort in Acapulco?”

Ethan raised a finger. “One day in the market I was approached by a headhunter working for a hospitality firm with ties all over Mexico, and who offered me a job as a waiter in a resort down there. It’s seasonal work, and the deal is, they bring down a fresh crop of young men for three-month stretches. We’re assigned ten tables each, three meals a day, and a lot of the customers stay for weeks at a time, so you wind up getting to know people fairly well.” Ethan made his hand into a gun and shot Eileen. “I never really did get the hang of the job, it’s true. All the bowing and hurrying. You’d think a lukewarm egg was the end of the actual world.”

Connie asked Eileen, “Were your parents impressed by this news of your plans to marry a waiter?”

“Oh, no, it’s been a terrific scandal,” said Eileen. “Mother slapped me right across my face! I did mention that, didn’t I, Ethan? About Mother slapping me across my face?”

“You mentioned it, yes,” said Ethan.

“And Daddy kicked over the cocktail caddy in protest, then walked across broken glass and there were little bloody footprints all over the veranda. Did I tell you about the cocktail caddy, Ethan? And the little bloody footprints all over the veranda?” Ethan was filling Eileen’s not-empty wineglass. He placed the glass in her hand and she drank without awareness she was drinking. “Mother did admit,” Eileen continued, “that if she were younger it would have been her running through the cane with Ethan. I think that’s sweet, really, don’t you, Ethan? She recognizes your value as a male specimen. Oh, but Daddy can’t hear Ethan’s name without spitting. Mother says he’s after disowning me but it’s too late, because I’m of age, and I’ve already received the bulk of my legacy.”

“And have you mapped out your plans?” said Connie.

“So much as they can be. Marriage first. We want to get that over with right away.”

“Will you have a large wedding?”

“Oh, yes. My extended family is sizable and they all want to get a good look at the cad I’ve given my person to. After the wedding, we’ll get out of that hovel of Ethan’s — which is where we’ve been staying, if you can believe it — and find a house in the area. Decoration and renovation while we honeymoon, and when we come home, then we’ll start our family. I want five children.” Ethan was again topping off her glass. “Yes, it’s quite full, Ethan, thank you.” She held her hair back and bent her head to sip at the wine without lifting the glass, which she could not have done without causing a spill. “We’ll have to find some sort of career for this layabout,” she said, “but so far we can’t name what that might be. Have you thought any more about what that might be, Ethan?”

“I haven’t,” said Ethan.

Eileen asked, “Don’t you think you should think about it?”

“I think I probably should,” Ethan said, sensibly. He turned to Bob. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re early. We’re waiting on the neighbors.”

It was only recently that Bob and Connie had established a rapport with the colorfully named Chance and Chicky Bitsch. They were genus Suburbiana: jolly drinkers and avid bridge players and bowlers; they chain-smoked Pall Malls and entertained nightly or nearly nightly. Chicky was the bartender and ashtray-emptier while Chance posted up at the stove, speaking through a veil of cigarette smoke, one eye clamped shut as he prepared his signature dish, a pepper-heavy boulder stew. Chance was a veteran of the Second World War, and while he rarely discussed his combat experience, Bob and Connie got the impression he’d seen extravagant grisliness there and now was devoted only to his comforts and leisure. Chicky was devoted to Chance and was not displeased by her earthly position, but still and she suffered regrets, a feeling of missed opportunity that comes to so many taking part in the matrimonial custom. When the Bitsches finally arrived they were fifteen minutes late, ice-clinking drinks and cigarettes in hand, apologizing for their tardiness, asking what they had missed, wondering if they should ever be forgiven for their rudeness and furthermore whether or not they deserved forgiveness. They were introduced to Ethan and then Eileen, who instantly asked after the origin of their surname. Chance, sitting, said, “My grandfather’s name was Heinrich Bitschofberger. He immigrated to the States by way of Dresden in advance of the First World War. Arriving in San Francisco, a helpful customs clerk pruned the name down for him. The clerk’s identity has been lost to time, sadly. I know my father would have liked to speak with him. He, the clerk, told my grandfather that Bitsch was a ‘good, strong, American name.’”

“You believe the clerk was being intentionally comical?” Eileen asked.

“I believe he believed he was being, yes.”

“Have you considered changing your name back to the original?”

“I’ve considered it. But when it comes down to actually performing the deed a defiance rises up in me and I elect to stay put.”

“And why?”

Chance sat a while, wondering how to put it. Looking at his wife, he said finally, “We are the Bitsches.”

Chicky explained that their being late was due to her immersion in an article she’d been reading in Time magazine, an exposé of the raucous and scandalizing goings-on at an East Coast liberal arts college that stoked and enflamed her sense of missing out. “These kids have it all sussed out,” she said. “They’re screwing in bushes.”

“Screwing in bushes is not a new thing,” said Chance. “Remember the Garden of Eden?”

“You never screwed me in bushes.”

“I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

“It’s not the sort of thing a lady should have to ask for. Anyway, it was a very interesting article. These art students are some lucky bunch, I’ll say.”

“Do you suffer the artistic impulse?” Eileen asked.

“Not at all. It was more the social aspect of the school I found intriguing. The article made it sound like a perfectly civilized four-year orgy. But here I’ve never been with another man besides Chance.”

“I think we’re all about the same, though, no?” said Chance.

“I feel doubt about that,” Chicky admitted.

“Has it ever occurred to you that I’m the best there is?”

“That hadn’t occurred to me, no.” Chicky turned to Connie. “Understand, please, my fondness for the man. I adore him, yes?”

“Of course,” said Connie. They were nodding at each other and Bob became uneasy because it seemed that they were drawing unflattering parallels.

Chance asked Connie, “Bob ever screw you in bushes, honey?”

“He never did, no.”

“Some men, these men of ours,” Chicky said.

Eileen said, “Ethan screwed me in bushes in Acapulco.”

“Okay, wow,” said Chicky, rolling up imaginary sleeves. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Connie said, “I thought you’d said it was in the cane.”

“It was in the cane as well as in bushes.”

Chicky slowly raised her glass in salute. “Best of goddamned luck to the both of you, and a long life to boot.” Now she saw her glass was empty, and reached for Chance’s, which also was empty. “I guess we should switch to wine, Chancey, what do you think?”

Chance was frowning; he told Bob, “She wants me to screw her in bushes, all she’s got to do is ask. But I’m not a mind reader.”

Dinner arrived and was consumed. Everyone praised the meal other than Eileen, who had made a long and thorough investigation of her plate before eating only half of what she’d been served. Chance and Chicky volunteered to clear the table, stacking and shuttling the dishes from the dining room and into the kitchen. Bob heard the soft squeak of the screen door opening and closing. Connie, meanwhile, sat watching Eileen. “I hope you were satisfied with your supper?” she asked. Eileen said, “It was very interesting, thank you. I’ve heard of meat loaf’s existence, but this was my first experience with it in person.” Connie took the blow, rallied, and announced that the dessert course would come next. She made for the kitchen to plate it and Ethan jumped up to help, leaving Bob alone with Eileen, who held her wineglass to her cheek, looking vaguely away. As though replying to something Bob had said, she told him, “It is a shame, that he’s not wealthy into the bargain.”

“Oh?” said Bob.

“Yes. If he was rich he would be, absolutely, the perfect man.” She took a long drink of wine. “I keep telling my mother ‘But Mother, once he’s married, he will be rich.’ ‘Not like we are,’ she says. ‘Exactly like we are,’ I say. ‘And by the same money.’ But no, she insists it isn’t the same.”

“No, I suppose it’s not.” In looking at Eileen, Bob felt he could say anything in the world to her, that he could admit to some enormous sin and that it would have no effect whatever. “It must be nice, wealthiness,” he said.

“Oh, I like it very much. Of course it has its own problems, like anything.”

“Yes,” said Bob. “And what are the problems?”

“Well, to fight for something, if and when you win it, it becomes more yours than if you’re simply given it. This ranges from little things to much larger.”

“And so,” Bob said, “when one doesn’t have to fight, then what?”

“To not have to fight may lead to — complacency.” She spoke the word as if it represented a state of depravity.

“Have you ever succumbed to complacency?”

“I’ve not known it in the first hand,” she said. “But it would be a bald lie to claim never to’ve seen it in others.”

Connie and Ethan returned and distributed the dessert portions, cherry pie with a thick wedge of Neapolitan ice cream.

“Oh, I love cherry pie,” said Eileen. “Is it homemade?”

Connie performed a small collapse. “It was homemade by the woman in the supermarket, and God bless her crampy little hands.” Ethan laughed hard at this; Eileen made a face of not seeing what was funny.

Ethan and Connie had returned to the same state as that first day they’d met, when they’d entered the library together, happy with themselves and each other. Bob watched as Ethan reached out to touch Connie’s forearm. He was only making a punctuative gesture, but it continued for such a duration, and Bob believed that this contact pleased Connie, so that he felt a quick queasiness. No sooner had Ethan and Connie finished their desserts than they began stacking dishes and gathering the cutlery, and again they went away to the kitchen, this time to do the washing up together. Eileen watched them leaving with a glazed expression; she’d drunk too much, too quickly. Reaching up to draw a lock of hair away from her face she toppled her wineglass, afterward contemplating the liquid as it soaked into the lace tablecloth. Bob sat there thinking of what it would be like to be married to this person, and decided it would be partly but not thoroughly terrible. It would be lonely. He didn’t understand Ethan’s decision to marry her, and he didn’t understand why she was in his home. Connie’s laughter sounded from the kitchen, and Eileen and Bob were looking in the direction of the noise. Again the screen door opened and shut and Chicky came in correcting her dress and picking pieces of grass from her hair. “Well, he screwed me in bushes,” she announced as she sat down. Chance entered the dining room smoking a cigar.

“How was it?” Bob asked.

Chicky made the half-and-half gesture; Chance said, “What are you talking about? It was great.” The chatter and laughter from the kitchen continued and Bob wondered how it was possible the dishes weren’t done yet. Eileen’s face had gone pale and she told Bob, “I’m going to lie down for a little while, if you don’t mind.” She moved to the living room; Bob heard the couch groan. He went into his head for a time and when he returned he decided he was ready for his guests to leave his house. He called out to Ethan that Eileen was ill.

“What did he say?” Bob heard Connie ask.

“That Eileen is ill.”

“Eileen is not well?”

“She has suffered a spell.”

“Has she toppled and fell?”

“Shall we give her a pill?”

Their laughter was a raspy cackling and Chicky sat watching Bob with a look imparting, he thought, condolence. He forced his face into a smile, to show he was not bothered, that there was nothing to be bothered by; but Chicky’s eyes were cold and staring. Connie still was laughing and Bob was no longer smiling and Eileen started retching, then loudly throwing up wine and meat loaf on the carpet in the living room, and everyone came into the room to watch, and after she was done then the dinner party also was done.

THE ENGAGEMENT WITH EILEEN DIDN’T LAST OUT THE MONTH. BOB found out from Ethan, who called him at work and told him, “I’m at the hospital.”

“Has someone been hurt?” Bob asked.

“I’ve been hurt. I’m still hurt, actually. Will you come visit me? There’s no one fun to talk to here.” Bob took a long lunch break, stopping for a bouquet of flowers on the way. When he arrived at the hospital he found Ethan abed, bored-looking but apparently healthy. When he made to sit up, though, he winced in what Bob took for significant pain. Bob pulled up a chair and asked what had happened. “The whole thing started,” Ethan said, “with Eileen’s mother, Georgie.”

Georgie, Ethan told Bob, was Eileen but twenty-five years older, and hardened by a life of lovelessness and languor. She could drink a bottle of champagne at brunch with never so much as a slur, she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and her pastime was viciousness, directed at her daughter in the morning hours and her husband after the sun set. Georgie endeavored to get Ethan off on his own and she succeeded without very much trouble at all, for she wore her age and vices well, and Ethan had not met a woman before who thought so little of telling him precisely what she wanted him to do. Georgie was a force, and she had style, and for a time these two were simpatico. “The other waiters got wind of my position and explained my good fortune to me. All I had to do was keep the husband in the dark and at season’s end I’d have a hundred-dollar tip and fond memories to boot. Fine, but there was Eileen, looking up at me as I poured her coffee, and I just had to engage with her. Georgie got wind of the budding friendship and made to head us off at the pass but it was too late, we’d already broke bread. Broken bread. The bread was in pieces.”

“So, the story you’re telling me,” Bob said, “is that you made love to your fiancée’s mother.”

“No, Georgie wasn’t my fiancée’s mother at the time of our entanglement. If we have to name a crime here, I guess you could say that I became engaged to the daughter of a woman I’d had an affair with.”

“So there was never any overlap?”

“That’s not a very friendly question, Bob. But yes, all right, preceding the engagement there was overlap, and yes, it became messy and complex. There was a lot of running around and ducking into closets, things like that. Each woman wore a strong perfume but not the same brand; I’ve never taken so many showers in my life. I managed to keep my relationship with Georgie hidden from Eileen and Eileen’s father but there were some very close shaves, and the stress level was high, and between the romantic cloak-and-dagger and the work schedule I wasn’t sleeping hardly at all. Around the same time Georgie and I started falling apart, Eileen and I became engaged. She told her folks and they packed up and dragged her to the airport. And that would have been that but for the fact of their living in Portland. Eileen’s folks had me fired, you see, and I was sent home, and so we all four were on the same flight back. When we landed, Eileen came away with me and we stayed in my apartment for however many weeks it took for me to figure out, you know, I could never marry this person.”

Bob said, “I didn’t understand the quickness of the engagement.”

“I was confused by that also.”

“So it was her idea?”

“If you want to get technical, it was my idea. But really, I had only meant it as that — an idea.”

“Something to discuss.”

“Something to bat around.”

“Something to chew on.”

“Put a pin in it, consider it later. But then she agreed with such — aggression. Anyway, yesterday was the day where I finally told her we’d have to call it all off.”

“And how did that go?”

“Bad, badly. Yelling and tears, cursing, the breaking of cups and plates, leaving, returning — she kept returning. Her point, and it was a fair point, was that she had already debased herself by agreeing to marry a waiter, ruining her standing. And then this same waiter breaks off the engagement? It’s a double ruining.” He shifted in his bed and again there was the look of pain.

Bob said, “I still don’t understand why you’re in the hospital?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Eileen tried to kill me.” He pulled down the collar of his hospital smock, revealing a stitched wound four or five inches below the left clavicle. “She stuck a steak knife in me while I was sleeping. We’d been fighting all afternoon and evening and I’d dozed off on the couch. When I woke up she was standing over me with a funny look on her face and her suitcase by her feet. ‘Where you going?’ Then I noticed the knife handle sticking out of my chest. Wait’ll you see the X-rays. The doctor says she missed the heart by millimeters.”

Bob sat considering this tale, and the way it existed in contrast to Ethan’s apparent amusement, when a nurse entered with a questioning face. “Are you behaving yourself?”

“Hello, Roberta. Yes, I am. Look, look at the flowers.”

“Oh, my goodness.” She saw Bob and asked, “Did your friend bring you flowers?”

“He sure did. What do you think about that?”

“I think that’s just nice. Let’s get them in some fresh water.” Roberta located a vase and filled it with water. She unwrapped the flowers and arranged them in the vase and set this down on the table at the foot of the bed. “I’ll leave them here so you can enjoy them.”

“Thank you, Roberta. Enjoying the flowers is important to me.”

Roberta was patting the flowers this and that way. “I’ll put some sugar in the water,” she said to Bob. “That makes the flowers stand up and say hello.” She left the room to seek the sugar out.

“Where was I in the story?” Ethan asked.

“You were lying there stabbed.”

“I was lying there, stabbed,” said Ethan. “And Eileen was gone and I just figured, okay, this is the end. But then time passed and I felt fine. A little bit tingly in the feet and hands, but otherwise all was as usual. I wasn’t about to take the knife out myself though, and I did crave the advice of a medical professional, so I put on my pants and slippers, no shirt, and went down to the pay phone on the corner. I made myself understood to the operator, then sat down in the booth and went to sleep, or maybe fainted, then I woke up here and the knife was gone and they won’t give it back to me and I think they lost it, actually. My one nice knife.”

“How are you feeling now?”

“I’m sore as hell and it’s uncomfortable to breathe but I didn’t die and I don’t have to get married. So, all things considered, I’m fine.”

“And where is Eileen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has she been arrested?”

“Oh, no. I’m not going to press charges or anything like that.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think that would be very gentlemanly, do you?”

“I’m not sure there’s a precedent for such a thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t know that a gentleman would have found himself in the position in the first place.”

“Okay, touché. But that only leads to my next point. I’ve been lying in this bed thinking about my habits and behaviors, Bob. And it seems to me that I’ve been spoiling for a stabbing for a good little minute, here.”

Bob didn’t disagree, or he didn’t disagree strongly, and he let the statement alone. He asked Ethan, “So is this to be your new-leaf moment, and now you’ll become chaste and worthy?”

“I don’t really know. Maybe this is just my lot in life. But I can’t claim that the violence against me was unearned, and I’ve decided to take my medicine without any gripes.” In a summing-up tone of voice, he said, “I’m not malicious, but I am careless. I don’t know that I know how to change, or if I even want to, but I’m thinking about the kind of man I want to be for the first time in my life, so there’s your silver lining.”

Roberta returned with the sugar for the flowers and news that it was time for Bob to leave Ethan to his rest. Ethan said he didn’t need rest but Roberta disagreed. She told Bob, “You can come back tomorrow.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” Bob told Ethan.

“Bring Connie,” Ethan told Bob.

“Who’s Connie?” Roberta asked Ethan, but he didn’t answer and neither did Bob. He waved and was away down the corridor. The next day he returned with Connie. When they entered the room, Ethan was sitting up in bed and reading from a stack of papers. “Well,” he said. Connie had been alarmed by Bob’s explanation of what had landed Ethan in the hospital; and though she was soothed by Ethan’s healthful demeanor, when she saw his knife wound, then did her alarm return, alarm that soon gave way to upset, and finally anger directed at Ethan and Bob both for treating a potentially fatal event as though it were only a lark or trifle. She asked what in the world was the matter with them, and they said they didn’t know what. She wanted to have Eileen arrested and said that if Ethan wouldn’t call the police then she would. Here Ethan held up the papers and said, “Even if I wanted to press charges, and I don’t, I couldn’t.”

“Why not?” Connie demanded.

“I’ll explain,” Ethan said, “but only if you’ll stop yelling at Bob and me.”

She crossed her arms and was silent. Ethan said that just before Bob and Connie arrived, Eileen’s father had come to visit, along with an associate of his, a funereal little man holding a briefcase. Eileen’s father’s attitude toward Ethan was cool at first; he was behaving as if he had just happened to be passing by and had paused to offer an impartial salutation. But soon enough he named the purpose of the visit, which was that he wanted to know what to expect in terms of legal repercussions so far as his daughter was concerned. Why hadn’t Ethan contacted the police yet? Ethan explained, almost reluctantly, as he didn’t like the idea of giving Eileen’s father what he wanted, his disinclination to bring Eileen to justice.

“Would you sign an agreement to that effect?” Eileen’s father asked.

“I don’t see why I should,” Ethan told him.

Eileen’s father looked to his comrade, who took an envelope from his briefcase and passed this to Eileen’s father, who passed it to Ethan. It held a cashier’s check for ten thousand dollars, made out in Ethan’s name. Ethan stared at the numerals. Eileen’s father said that he understood his daughter had misbehaved. Ethan told him, “There’s misbehavior and there’s misbehavior.”

“You signed?” asked Connie.

“Yes.”

“So you’re rich,” said Bob.

“I’m a little bit rich.”

“And now what?”

“I don’t know. I mean, this happened fifteen minutes ago. I guess I’ll make plans? Heal? They’re discharging me tomorrow morning. Can you come get me and drop me at my apartment, Bob? You’ll get your weekly cardiovascular exercise helping me up the stairs.”

“Sure,” said Bob.

Connie was shaking her head, her face descriptive of both amusement and contempt. “I’m asking again: What, in the world, is the matter with you two?” Ethan and Bob looked on, not understanding. Connie explained, “You’re coming to stay with us until you’re well again, Ethan.”

THE HOUSE ACHIEVED A NEW ASPECT BY ETHAN’S PRESENCE, WHICH for Bob took some getting used to. Each weekday morning while Connie and Ethan slept, Bob rose and began his preparations for the workday; only now he no longer lit his fire, or fixed himself a full breakfast, actions that Connie said would cause a disturbance and work at cross-purposes with Ethan’s rehabilitation. One evening Bob reached for his alarm clock and discovered its bells had been wrapped in cotton batting.

“What did you do to my clock?” he asked Connie.

“It wakes up Ethan.”

“It wakes up me. That’s its job.”

“It’ll still wake you up, maniac.” And it did, but Bob missed the instant of piercing terror the naked bells drilled into him.

He found he disliked leaving the house for work, leaving Connie and Ethan alone for so many hours, and would shudder in crossing the threshold of the front door, as though revolted by a magnetic field. The days at the library were longer than usual, and when he came home Connie was distracted, either tending to Ethan or cooking for him or else tiptoeing around because he was having his nap. Bob recognized that Ethan had truly needed a place to recuperate and was glad to give shelter to his friend; but he also felt that his household had become infected by an imbalance that was, at the very least, an imposition. He was approaching the tipping point toward a true unhappiness when Ethan began his return to health, and Connie became less distracted by her caring for him, and so she came back to Bob. By the end of the first week of Ethan’s three-week stay, Bob was relieved of his petty fears and jealousies by simply witnessing the way Ethan and Connie behaved around each other. The truth was that they liked each other. The truth was also that they loved and adored Bob, always so enthusiastic at his return in the evening, wanting to know all the gossip of his workday. They laughed together at the dinner table — Ethan could only gently laugh — and Bob understood that nothing of his relationship with Connie had been compromised.

Ethan improved further, and with his awakening he was visited by a desire to spend some of the money his wound had yielded him. He began making purchases by telephone and mail so that each day when Bob came home there was something new to show off, a wristwatch, or robe, silk pajamas, a shaving kit, all the little male niceties he had until that time gone without. He gave Bob any number of gifts in this same line; Bob suggested Ethan might buy Connie something as well, and Ethan became shy and said that he knew he should but that when he’d brought it up to Connie she had refused him in a way that he took to be heartfelt.

By the end of the second week Ethan was ambulatory and spent the days climbing up and down the stairs, circulating through the bathroom and kitchen and living room, making small messes at each location he visited. Bob had seen Ethan’s apartment and knew he was a sloppy man, but to experience such disarray in his own orderly home was something else. Ethan was a great one for picking a book off the shelf and taking it to some far corner of the house, leaving it open-faced on the floor, where it would remain until Bob dusted it off and returned it to its home. When Bob found a book left out overnight on the grass in the backyard, he went to get Ethan from the kitchen and walked him, in his pajamas, to the back door. He pointed at the book. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry,” Ethan told him.

One evening Bob came home to find Ethan and Connie bickering in the living room. “Ethan is trying to give us money,” Connie said. Bob had had a bad day at work and was climbing up the stairs to seek out a bottle of aspirin in the bathroom. “So he wants to give us money,” Bob said. “Let him.” Connie and Ethan both raised their eyebrows at that. Ethan never did give them any money.

At the end of the third week, Bob and Connie were married, with Ethan standing as best man. The newlyweds didn’t ask Ethan to leave, but he was left to his own devices while they were hidden away in their room all through the weekend. On Monday Bob came home from work to find Connie sitting alone in the nook, reading a magazine, but angrily. “Good news, Bob. You can take the cotton off your alarm clock.”

“He’s gone home?” Bob asked.

“He has.”

He sat down opposite her. “That’s not so bad a thing, is it?”

She said, “Of course he’s well enough now, and if he wants to go, then go. But no, I don’t understand why he did it the way he did it.”

“How did he do it?”

“He came downstairs after you left for work and he was dressed and packed and said he was going home and thanks, a lot. Those were the words he used, comma after the thanks. Walked right out the door.”

She was confused by the suddenness of his departure, and she was unhappy by the way it was achieved. When Ethan came to visit Bob at the library the next day, Bob took him to task for his rudeness. Ethan bowed his head; in his defense he claimed that he’d had a sudden case of ants in the pants, and Bob surely knew what that was like. Bob said that, actually, he’d never had ants in his pants, at least not that he could remember. “Well,” said Ethan, “trust me when I say it makes it so you’ve got to move.” Bob encouraged Ethan to apologize to Connie, and Ethan said that he would, but he didn’t. Connie merely shrugged when Bob recounted the interaction; she said it was a shame, but people would often let you down, and that was all there was to it. Bob felt, for the first time, unimpressed with Ethan; he wondered if he hadn’t finally achieved the full-scope portrait of the man. Later, after the household went to pieces, after the thing with the string, Bob supposed that what had actually happened was Ethan had fallen in love with Connie during his convalescence. This was why he had left in such a rush, and this was why he began to hide himself away from her; to pretend, really, that she didn’t exist in relation to Bob’s life. Perhaps he thought if he ran away fast enough and stayed gone long enough then he might get clean away from the cursed, blessed feeling.

CONNIE DECIDED THAT SHE AND BOB WERE NOT TAKING ADVANTAGE OF their proximity to Oregon’s natural surroundings, and that they should go on hikes, and become hikers, and she bought a book on the subject of hikes and also a pair of hiking boots. Bob didn’t want to give away a Saturday’s worth of couch reading to what he believed was a fleeting desire of Connie’s, but in the name of peace-in-the-home he agreed that they would and should attack a five-mile loop at the base of Mount Hood that coming weekend. The afternoon before the hike, Bob met Ethan for lunch at the Finer Diner. Since Ethan had left Bob’s house he’d taken on a paleness or apartness from the world that on this day was mounting in the direction of the acute. Bob asked Ethan what was the matter, and Ethan made a long inhalation through his nostrils. The impression he had, he said, exhaling, was that the current was directly, unmistakably, and for the first time in his life, against him. Every step he took was wrong; every natural decision and inclination resulted in some manner of snubbing or rejection. Bob still had no true comprehension of the reason for Ethan’s crisis; he told Ethan that slumps were a part of life and that his would soon pass him by. “You don’t get it,” said Ethan simply. “Something is wrong. Even my good news is bad news these days.”

“What’s your good news?”

Ethan hesitated. “Never mind.” He began busily stirring his black coffee.

“Then what’s the bad news?”

“Nothing, Bob.” He put his hand on Bob’s arm, and he looked contrite. “I’m sorry I said anything. I’m fine. Let’s skip it.”

Bob invited Ethan to come on the hike and Ethan demurred, but when Bob pressed him he agreed that it might be helpful to get out of town, out of his apartment, away from the fumes of himself. “Though, Connie probably won’t want me along,” he said.

“Sure she would.”

“You think she would?”

“Why wouldn’t she?” He told Ethan they’d pick him up at nine o’clock the next morning. At eight o’clock, Bob stood lurking at Connie’s elbow while she cooked their breakfast. “You’re emitting that wants-something ozone, Bob,” she said, and he admitted it was true, and explained about his idea that they should bring Ethan along with them to Mount Hood. Connie’s face expressed nothing; finally she said, “Can we not?”

“We don’t have to. But I think it could be good for him.”

“Why, what’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know what, and he doesn’t know. But he’s very low, lately.”

Connie still wore a blank face, her arm stirring a pot of porridge. “I wanted it to be just us.”

“Just us is not new,” Bob told her. He didn’t mean it as a complaint, didn’t intend it to be anything other than true, but Connie did harden up after he’d said it, and now came the concession: yes, Ethan could tag along, if that was what Bob wanted and thought was best. When the Chevy pulled up outside Ethan’s apartment he was waiting on the curb, standing hatless in the drizzle and staring into the air, ruffled and damp and confused-looking. “Jesus, he’s like a hobo,” Connie said. Ethan climbed into the Chevy as though he were getting into a taxi. He sat in the back, looking out the window, not speaking, not responding to Bob’s good-morning greeting. Connie turned around in her seat and began to tease Ethan, pinching his nose and poking his middle, as if he were a baby. “Stop,” Ethan said in a flat, croaking voice.

“Maybe,” Connie said to Bob, “maybe his heart was nicked by that steak knife after all, and now it’s all flat and rubbery like a popped balloon.” She took Ethan’s face in her hand and crushed it slightly. “Does that not look like the face of a man with a popped balloon heart?”

Bob couldn’t understand where Connie’s meanness was coming from, and it made him uneasy as they moved away from Portland and in the direction of the mountain. They drove for forty-five minutes along a winding, two-lane highway. The cloud cover lifted and the sun came down over the road, steam rising off the pavement. Connie put on a pair of sunglasses and rolled the dial on the radio, landing on an antic jazz number. She snapped her fingers and popped her mouth; when the station dropped away she changed over to the news station. They came to an isolated diner and Connie volunteered that Bob should go and get them a thermosful of coffee. It had been Bob’s job that morning to fetch the thermos from the Chevy, but he’d forgotten to fill it before they left. “Now,” Connie told him, “you can turn back the clock and set your mistake to rights, Bob. Isn’t that lucky?” Bob pulled over and walked across the parking lot with the empty thermos. He entered the diner and the waitress said it would be five minutes until the pot was brewed and so he sat in a booth to wait. Looking out across the parking lot he saw that Ethan was sitting up high in the backseat of the Chevy, and speaking to Connie as if he were scolding her. Connie had shifted to the driver’s position, hands on the steering wheel, looking forward, sunglasses still on, expressionless. Bob watched as Ethan reached up and touched Connie’s shoulder. Connie pulled away and turned to face Ethan, addressing him sharply, fiercely. After she had finished, and resumed her forward-facing driver’s position, Ethan dropped back in his seat, his posture sullen and low. Neither of them was speaking anymore. Minutes later, as Bob crossed the parking lot with the full thermos, they still were silent, ignoring each other. When Bob got in the car, and before he could ask what was the matter, Connie said, “Ethan’s trying to ruin the day, Bob. But we’re not going to let him, are we?”

Bob asked Ethan, “Why are you trying to ruin the day?”

“I don’t know why,” he said.

“Notice that he doesn’t deny he’s trying to ruin it,” Connie said.

“I did notice that,” Bob said. He asked Ethan, “Won’t you deny it?”

“I won’t, no. Because I am trying to ruin it.” He reached for the thermos and, unscrewing the lid, poured himself a cupful.

Connie was adjusting the rearview mirror. “Well,” she said, “if he’s going to try to ruin the day then he should just get out of our car and walk home, or walk into traffic, either one.”

Bob turned to Ethan and made a face of mock shock. He wished to defuse the situation, to undo whatever was the matter, but Ethan was distracted by his own bitter mysteries and wouldn’t go along with this. He took a sip of the coffee, winced at the heat of it, fanned his tongue, and put his tongue away. “You know what, though, Bob? She’s right. And I’m sorry. I’ll stop. I’m stopping.” And then he did stop; by the time they arrived at the trailhead he was sitting up and behaving normally, or more normally than he had been.

It had turned into such a pretty day: brisk but not cold, damp but not raining, with bright, dazzling sunlight coming through the breaks in the branches of the trees as the trio moved along a footpath toward the rounded static-sound of the running river. Ethan was leading the way and moving at a skipping half-jog, with Connie behind Ethan, and Bob behind Connie. From time to time Ethan would look back, his face reflecting a high and uncomplicated happiness. Bob wondered what it was that had made him so sickly before, and also how he could simply turn that sickliness off. Connie rolled her eyes at Ethan, but she was amused, back to liking him again.

The river was high and roiling and they had to raise their voices to hear one another. Connie consulted the map in her hiking guidebook and pointed north, upriver. There was a footbridge, she said, that would connect them to a trail on the far side of the water. But, when they arrived at the place where the bridge was said to be they saw it had been damaged and almost entirely washed away, timber gone, and the rope handrailing hanging down in a tangle, frayed ends bouncing and dragging across the surface of the swollen, glassy river. It was impassable, and they continued walking north in search of some other way across.

Farther on and they came to a fir that had fallen fully across the river. It was wide enough to carry their weight but rested at a sharp incline and was covered with a coating of slick moss. They spoke among themselves and decided that in the spirit of resourcefulness this would pass for their bridge — but who would be first to cross? Ethan volunteered that Bob should do the honors; Bob countered that the honors clearly belonged to Ethan; Connie said she would go, at which point Ethan and Bob both pushed forward, each in a hurry to be the foremost conqueror. Bob arrived ahead of Ethan and clambered up to stand atop the broad base of the uprooted tree, looking down at his wife and friend as they looked up at him, Ethan encouraging Bob onward, Connie half-covering her face, scared of what might come.

Bob endeavored to ground himself. He considered the way across, the best and safest route he could follow; he breathed and made himself calm and now moved forward, step by step, arms out like a tightrope walker. It was not so bad when there was solid earth on either side of the tree but once he cleared land, and with only water underneath him, then did he become less sure of himself, his vision distracted by the fast-moving river. He was bending to achieve a crouch when he lost his footing on a slimy patch of moss and his feet went out from underneath him; he landed hard on his backside, sliding down the length of the fir and at such a sickening speed he hadn’t the time even to curse or exclaim in his mind. Happily, half-miraculously, he didn’t fall into the river, but was shot out onto the farther shore, rolling over fully twice before coming to rest in a tangle of branches. When he stood and turned, Connie and Ethan were jumping up and down and shouting and clapping, but he couldn’t hear them at all. He waved and noticed his hand was bleeding; also his backside ached. But nothing was broken, and he wasn’t seriously injured. In the wake of cheating disaster, he was experiencing something like euphoria.

Obviously, however, and in light of Bob’s crossing, it was established to be too dangerous for either Connie or Ethan to follow after; and neither could Bob return the way he’d come. And so, what came next? Across the river, Connie and Ethan were talking about the same thing. Ethan explained to Bob by hand gestures that they should all continue on in a northerly direction to seek out some other, safer passage over the water. Bob didn’t like this plan, but could think of no alternative, for there was none, and so the bisected group struck out upriver.

At the same time Bob’s euphoria was receding, his pain was growing more pronounced. His backside stung, and his hand was throbbing, though no longer freely bleeding. He trudged along, watching Ethan and Connie, who were enjoying a lively conversation. Connie was in the lead; whenever she called to Ethan he would rush up closer to hear, then shout out his response, and she would nod and he would nod and they went happily back and forth like this, without care or concern, certainly without concern for Bob, that he could see. He noticed that their path was leading them away from the water and into the woods. They still were blithely chatting as they disappeared behind a line of trees, unbothered to be out of sight. Bob was walking more quickly now, hurrying to reconnect with them; but long minutes were passing where he couldn’t see Connie and Ethan and though it wasn’t anyone’s fault, he felt he was being treated cruelly — that fate was behaving cruelly toward him.

A mile, and there was a sharp eastward bend in the river; once Bob walked clear of this he saw a little footbridge in the distance, and that Connie and Ethan were waiting on the far side, still immersed in their conversation. He crossed the bridge and came upon them; they looked up at Bob, untroubled, as though nothing was wrong. They welcomed him as an explorer back from the edge of the world, teasingly, not unpleasantly; but Bob was stung by a sense of exclusion, so that he wasn’t sure how he should behave just then. Connie inspected his hand but he took his hand back and said that it was fine; she asked if he was limping and he said that he wasn’t. Here was the very beginning of his realization that there was something dangerous moving in his direction, and that he wouldn’t be allowed to escape it, no matter what clever maneuver he might invent or employ.

Connie and Ethan told Bob they’d had enough of hiking and wanted to head back to the car. Bob said that was fine, and it was, but as they made to leave, Connie took Bob by his shoulders and set him at the front of the group. Why had she done this? He walked on, carrying his worries, and he told himself he wouldn’t look back, not even once, but then he did, and he saw Connie was herself looking back at Ethan. They weren’t speaking; she just was looking at him, and Ethan at her, and he was smiling behind his eyes so Bob knew that Connie must also have been smiling. Bob turned around to face the path. “You are limping, Bob,” Connie told him. They came away from the river and the sound of it became quieter, while the highway sound grew louder. They arrived at the car and settled into their seats; there was a silence among the three of them that for Bob had the texture of a nightmare. He had a bad moment where he thought he might shriek or come away at the seams of himself, but then he turned the key in the ignition and the news came on the radio and saved him: a bland male voice imparting sensible human world knowledges at a patient rate of speed.

IN THE DAYS AFTER THE HIKE BOB WOULD ENTER A ROOM TO FIND Connie standing at a window, lost to some dream or reverie. When he would ask her what she was doing, she would kiss his cheek and breeze away to stand at another window. This phase lasted a week. Then there came another phase, also a week, of peevishness. Bob felt she was not angry at him, but at the world. Actually, she doted on Bob during these days; she cooked all of his favorite meals and instigated bullying intercourse during which she demanded to know what pleased him — was it this or was it that or what was it? Bob wasn’t sure what was happening but wondered if he hadn’t stumbled onto a chapter of the marital experience undiscussed by the masses.

Ethan stayed away from Bob and Connie’s house, but his visits to the library carried on as was usual, and he and Bob had their weekday lunches at the Finer Diner. His apartness had returned, deepened; he still claimed not to know what was bothering him. He never ate; he only drank cup after cup of black coffee.

“You don’t eat anymore,” Bob said.

“No,” said Ethan.

“You should eat something. You should eat food.”

“Okay.” But, when Sally came to take their order, Ethan wanted only coffee. He told Bob, “I’m not sleeping, I can’t sleep.”

“You should sleep,” Bob counseled.

Ethan groaned, and began rubbing his face with his palms. He seemed agitated, even angry; after a long silence, he told Bob, “Say something.” There was an accusatory slant to these words which surprised and confused Bob; it was as though Ethan believed Bob was keeping some crucial truth from him. And Bob wasn’t sure what Ethan actually needed, but decided to tell him about the two children whose conversation he’d overheard at the library that morning: a boy and a girl, seven or eight years old, were sitting side by side in the children’s nook. As Bob was passing by, the boy was proclaiming that something, some event he’d just described, had really and truly occurred — the girl having apparently doubted the tale. The boy’s face was solemn, his voice sincere. “But I swear that’s what happened,” he was saying. “I swear to God it did.” And the girl, without looking up from her book, without raising her voice, told the boy, “Don’t bring God into this.”

Ethan’s laughter in response to the anecdote was loud, true, and weird; their fellow diners all were startled, and Sally came by and said, “Goddamn, Patty, can you spare us a laugh or are you gonna hog it all for yourself?”

“I’m going to hog it,” Ethan said. He walked Bob back to the library; when Bob waved goodbye, Ethan only stared. He looked so hungry, Bob thought. “Eat,” he said, and Ethan waved a hand that he would.

Meanwhile, back at home, Connie was entering into a third phase, another phase of happiness, but this was different from the looking-out-the-window happiness. It was something richer, more like a baseline satisfaction, a thorough confidence. She no longer was cooking for or seducing Bob; she only performed a caretakerish doting over his person, as though he were suffering under some nonfatal yet unenviable impairment.

These days and phases amounted to clues for Bob. The clues came together to form a sense of error in him, and there was a return of the revulsion in crossing the threshold of his front door when he left for work each morning, as though the house itself was telling him, stay.

One day, a Wednesday, and after Ethan stood Bob up for lunch, Bob came home early from the library. He didn’t tell Connie he was coming home early, he just did it. When he pulled into the driveway he saw that the front door was half open, and he wondered what this could mean, and why it made him feel afraid. He walked up the path and into the house, moving from room to room, slowly, stepping softly. He was listening, but there was nothing to listen to. He walked to the living room and saw the back door was open and that Connie was sitting on the bench in the yard, sitting up very straight and staring upward, as one in the grips of a beatitude. She wasn’t smiling but her carriage and expression presented a higher joy, like a religious fanatic filled up by the Spirit. Bob walked over and sat next to her on the bench. He saw that she had a length of fat red string double bow-tied around her wrist, and that she was pinching and petting it. She still was looking away when she said, “Hello.” She was wearing makeup, perfume. She turned to look at Bob.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You seem strange.”

“I’m not.” She rested her face against Bob’s chest. “Your heart’s beating so fast.” She leaned back to make a study of Bob, and for a time she was herself again, in her eyes, in the way she looked at him, worried but also amused — Connie.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Bob said that it was nothing, just that he’d missed her, and then he kissed her, and she kissed him back but quickly pulled away. She stood up from the bench and asked if Bob was hungry and he said that he wasn’t. She said she was going to make soup for dinner and he said soup was fine. She pulled him up to stand and walked him to the living room. She sat him down on the couch and pressed a book into his hand and brought him a beer in a chubby brown bottle. She returned to the kitchen and Bob was not reading the book or drinking the beer but visualizing Connie’s sounds as he heard them: the clap of the cutting board laid out on the countertop; the knife unsheathed from its block. She began chopping up an onion. Bob could see her movements so clearly in his mind, as if he were standing just beside her.

“What’s that string on your wrist?” he called.

She stopped chopping the onion. “Some string.”

“But who tied it on you?”

“I tied it on myself,” she told him — just like that. Bob didn’t say anything more about it. They hardly spoke through the afternoon or at the dinner table. After they ate, they cleaned the kitchen together, but it felt as if each person was pretending the other wasn’t there. They moved upstairs and Bob undressed and redressed and got into bed while Connie shut herself up in the bathroom and ran a bath. When she came out after, she was wearing her pajamas, and the string wasn’t on her wrist. She got into bed with Bob and they lay there in the dark. After a while, he could hear the sound of Connie sleeping. Bob lay awake for a long time, but eventually he also fell asleep, without meaning to or knowing that he was. He woke up just before five, slipped out of bed and into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the light.

He looked in the trash but the string wasn’t there. He’d wanted it to be there; it was important to him that it was and he felt disappointed to learn that it wasn’t. But where was it? Connie kept an abalone shell in the medicine chest, which was where she put her rings and earrings; the string had been carefully looped and was resting in the shell atop the jewelry. Bob picked out the string and lowered the toilet seat and sat. He lay the string out on the countertop, then set his left hand, knuckles down, over the top of the string, breaking at the line of the wrist. Using his right hand, then, he tried to tie a double bow; but the string wasn’t uniform, its fibers were kinky and sticking out every which way, and he only made a mess. He untangled the string and tried again but found he couldn’t tie even a single bow. He made a third and fourth attempt, a fifth attempt, but he soon understood he could try a hundred times and would never be able to tie a tidy double bow with fat hanging loops the way the string had been on Connie’s wrist. He could never do it and she could never either, and he stood away from the string, watching it, sensing his person in the mirror on the periphery of his vision but feeling unable to look up and meet his reflection. He took the string and left the bathroom and sat on the edge of the mattress. Connie stirred and blinked and looked at him through half-shut eyes. When she saw the string in his hand she began to rise in the bed, as if some force was evenly elevating her, and her eyes were opening wider, and she was watching the string with a sick look on her face. Bob told her, “I don’t see how you could’ve tied that double bow all by yourself. Will you show me how you did it?” He was speaking quietly and not unkindly, and she was nodding agreeably, yes, all right, of course, and took the string away from Bob and set about attempting to tie it to her wrist. When the bow fell apart in her hands, then she tried again, and a third time. When the bow fell apart a fourth time she tilted her face upward, looking at Bob with a puzzlement, as though she didn’t know quite what they were doing, how they had come to find themselves at this obscure intersection. The very beginnings of the new morning were evident in the curtain covering the bedroom window; the room was growing by the first traces of daylight. Connie snapped the string to its full length and draped it across her wrist as if to try again, but now she’d begun to cry, and Bob watched this, watched as she balled the string in her fist and brought her fist up to cover her face, shuddering, crying harder, but silently.

Bob still didn’t fully understand, he was not allowing himself to completely understand what had happened to his life when his alarm clock sounded and the noise filled the room and terrified him, so that he lunged and snatched the clock from the bedside table to silence it. He began stepping backward and away from Connie, backward until he was clear of the room, pausing at the top of the stairs, the ticking of the clock in the flesh of his palms and now, yes, now he understood what had happened, the sound of the alarm had hopped into the center of him and told him what, and this was the way it had all gone so badly for Bob Comet; this was the thing with the string.