The New Yorker Stories

The day he went to Greenwich to visit for the first time after the divorce, Ben and Shelby hadn’t been there. Inez was there, though, and she had gone along on the tour of the redecorated house that Amanda had insisted on giving him. Tom knew that Inez had not wanted to walk around the house with them. She had done it because Amanda had asked her to, and she had also done it because she thought it might make it less awkward for him. In a way different from the way he loved Amanda, but still a very real way, he would always love Inez for that.

Now Inez is coming into the study, hesitating as her eyes accustom themselves to the dark. “You’re awake?” she whispers. “Are you all right?” She walks to the bed slowly and sits down. His eyes are closed, and he is sure that he could sleep forever. Her hand is on his; he smiles as he begins to drift and dream. A bird extends its wing with the grace of a fan opening; los soldados are poised at the crest of the hill. About Inez he will always remember this: when she came to work on Monday, after the weekend when Amanda had told him about Shelby and said that she was getting a divorce, Inez whispered to him in the kitchen, “I’m still your friend.” Inez had come close to him to whisper it, the way a bashful lover might move quietly forward to say “I love you.” She had said that she was his friend, and he had told her that he never doubted that. Then they had stood there, still and quiet, as if the walls of the room were mountains and their words might fly against them.

Gravity

My favorite jacket was bought at L. L. Bean. It got from Maine to Atlanta, where an ex-boyfriend of mine found it at a thrift shop and bought it for my birthday. It was a little tight for him, but he was wearing it when he saw me. He said that if I had not complimented him on the jacket he would just have kept it. In the pocket I found an amyl nitrite and a Hershey’s Kiss. The candy was put there deliberately.

In the eight years I’ve had it, I’ve lost all the buttons but the top one—the one I never button because nobody closes the button under the collar. Four buttons are gone, but I can only remember how the next-to-last one disappeared: I saw it dangling but thought it would hold. Later, crouched on the floor, I said, “It stands to reason that since I haven’t moved off this barstool, it has to be on the floor right here,” drunkenly staring at the floor beneath my barstool at the Café Central.

Nick, the man I’m walking with now, couldn’t possibly fit into the jacket. He wishes that I didn’t fit into it, either. He hates the jacket. When I told him I was thinking about buying a winter scarf, he suggested that rattails might go with the jacket nicely. He keeps stopping at store windows, offering to buy me a sweater, a coat. Nothing doing.

“I’m going crazy,” Nick says to me, “and you’re depressed because you’ve lost your buttons.” We keep walking. He pokes me in the side. “Buttons might as well be marbles,” he says.

“Did you ever play marbles?”

“Play marbles?” he says. “Don’t you just look at them?”

“I don’t think so. I think there’s a game you can play with them.”

“I had cigar boxes full of marbles when I was a kid. Isn’t that great? I had marbles and stamps and coins and Playboy cutouts.”

“All at the same time?”

“What do you mean?”

“The stamps didn’t come before the Playboy pictures?”

“Same time. I used the magnifying glass with the pictures instead of the stamps.”

The left side of my jacket overlaps the right, and my arms are crossed tightly in front of me, holding it closed. Nick notices and says, “It’s not very cold,” putting an arm around my shoulders.

He’s right. It isn’t. Last Friday afternoon, the doctor told me I was going to have to go to the hospital on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, to have a test to find out if some blockage in a Fallopian tube has been causing the pain in my left side, and I’m a coward. I have never believed anything in The Bell Jar except Esther Greenwood’s paranoid idea that when you’re unconscious you feel pain and later you forget that you felt it.

He’s taken his arm away. I keep tight hold on my jacket with one hand and put my other hand around his wrist so he’ll take his hand out of his pocket.

“Give me the hand,” I say. We walk along like that.

The other buttons fell off without seeming to be loose. They came off last winter. That was when I first fell in love with Nick, and other things seemed very unimportant. I thought then that during the summer I’d sew on new buttons. It’s October now, and cold. We’re walking up Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks away from the hospital where I’ll have the test. When he realizes it, he’ll turn down a side street.

“You’re not going to die,” he says.

“I know,” I say, “and it would be silly to be worried about anything short of dying, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t take it out on me,” he says, and steers me onto Ninety-sixth Street.

There are no stars this evening, so Nick is talking about the stars. He asks if I’ve ever imagined the thoughts of the first astronomer turning the powerful telescope on Saturn and seeing not only the planet but rings—smoky loops. He stops to light a cigarette.

The chrysanthemums planted down the middle of Park Avenue are just a blur in the dark. I think of de Heem’s flowers: move close to one of his paintings and you see a snail curled on the wood, and tiny insects coating the leaves. It happens sometimes when you bring flowers in from the garden—a snail that looks and feels like pus, climbing a stem.

Last Friday, Nick said, “You’re not going to die.” He got out of bed and moved me away from the vase of flowers. It was the day I had gone to the doctor, and then we went away to visit Justin for the weekend. (Ten years ago, when Nick started living with Barbara, Justin was their next-door neighbor on West Sixteenth Street.) Everything was lovely, the way it always is at Justin’s house in the country. There was a vase of phlox and daisies in the bedroom, and when I went to smell the flowers I saw the snail and said that it looked like pus. I wasn’t even repelled by it—just sorry it was there, curious enough to finger it.

“Justin’s not going to know what you’re crying about. Justin doesn’t deserve this,” Nick whispered.

When touched, the snail did not contract. Neither did it keep moving.

Fact: her name is Barbara. She is the Boulder Dam. She is small and beautiful, and she has a hold on him even though they never married, because she was there first. She is the Boulder Dam.

Last year we had Christmas at Justin’s. Justin wants to think of us as a family—Nick and Justin and me. His real family is one aunt, in New Zealand. When he was a child she made thick cookies for him that never baked through. Justin’s ideas are more romantic than mine. He thinks that Nick should forget Barbara and move, with me, into the house that is for sale next door. Justin, in his thermal slippers and knee-high striped socks under his white pajamas, in the kitchen brewing Sleepytime tea, saying to me, “Name me one thing more pathetic than a fag with a cold.”

Barbara called, and we tried to ignore it. Justin and I ate cold oranges after the Christmas dinner. Justin poured champagne. Nick talked to Barbara on the phone. Justin blew out the candles, and the two of us were sitting in the dark, with Nick standing at the phone and looking over his shoulder into the suddenly darkened corner, frowning in confusion.

Standing in the kitchen later that night, Nick had said, “Justin, tell her the truth. Tell her you get depressed on Christmas and that’s why you get drunk. Tell her it’s not because of one short phone call from a woman you never liked.”

Justin was making tea again, to sober up. His hand was over the burner, going an inch lower, half an inch more . . .

“Play chicken with him,” he whispered to me. “Don’t you be the one who gets burned.”

A lady walks past us, wearing a blue hat with feathers that look as if they might be arrows shot into the brim by crazy Indians. She smiles sweetly. “The snakes are crawling out of Hell,” she says.

In a bar, on Lexington, Nick says, “Tell me why you love me so much.” Without a pause, he says, “Don’t make analogies.”

When he is at a loss—when he is lost—he is partly lost in her. It’s as though he were walking deeper and deeper into a forest, and I risked his stopping to smell some enchanted flower or his finding a pond and being drawn to it like Narcissus. From what he has told me about Barbara, I know that she is deep and cool.

Lying on the cold white paper on the doctor’s examining table, I tried to concentrate not on what he was doing but on a screw holding one of the four corners of the flat, white ceiling light.

As a child, I got lost in the woods once. I had a dandelion with me, and I used it, hopelessly, like a flashlight, the yellow center my imaginary beam. My parents, who might have saved me, were drunk at a back-yard party as I kept walking the wrong way, away from the houses I might have seen. I walked slower and slower, being afraid.

Nick makes a lot of that. He thinks I am lost in my life. “All right,” I say as he nudges me to walk faster. “Everything’s symbolic.”

“How can you put me down when you make similes about everything?”

“I do not,” I say. “The way you talk makes me want to put out my knuckles to be beaten. You’re as critical as a teacher.”

The walk is over. He’s even done what I wanted: walked the thirty blocks to her apartment, instead of taking a cab, and if she’s anxious and looking out the window, he’s walked right up to the door with me, and she’ll see it all—even the kiss.

It amazes him that at the same time variations of what happens to Barbara happen to me. She had her hair cut the same day I got mine trimmed. When I went to the dentist and he told me my gums were receding slightly, I hoped she’d outdo me by growing fangs. Instead, when my side started to hurt she got much worse pains. Now she’s slowly getting better, back at the apartment after a spinal-fusion operation, and he’s staying with her again.

Autumn, 1979. On the walk we saw one couple kissing, three people walking dogs, one couple arguing, and a cabdriver parked in front of a drugstore, changing from a denim jacket to black leather. He pulled on a leather cap, threw the jacket into the back seat, and drove away, making a U-turn on Park Avenue, headed downtown. One man looked at me as if he’d just found me standing behind the counter of a kissing booth, and one woman gave Nick such a come-on look that it made him laugh before she was even out of earshot.

“I can’t stand it,” Nick says.

He doesn’t mean the craziness of New York.

He opens the outside door with his key, after the kiss, and for a minute we’re squeezed together in the space between locked doors. I’ve called it jail. A coffin. Two astronauts, strapped in on their way to the moon. I’ve stood there and felt, more than once, the lightness of a person who isn’t being kept in place by gravity, but my weightlessness has been from sadness and fear.

Barbara is upstairs, waiting, and Nick doesn’t know what to say. I don’t. Finally, to break the silence, he pulls me to him. He tells me that when I asked for his hand earlier, I called it “the hand.”

His right hand is extended, fingers on the bone between my breasts. I look down for a second, the way a surgeon must have a moment of doubt, or even a moment of confidence, looking at the translucent, skin-tight rubber glove: his hand and not his hand, about to do something important or not important at all.

“Anybody else would have said ‘your hand,’ ” Nick says. “When you said it that way, it made it sound as if my hand was disembodied.” He strokes my jacket. “You’ve got your security blanket. Let me keep all the parts together. On the outside, at least.”

Disembodied, that hand would be a symbol from Magritte: a castle on a rock, floating over the ocean; a green apple without a tree.

Alone, I’d know it anywhere.

Running Dreams

Barnes is running with the football. The sun strikes his white pants, making them shine like satin. The dog runs beside him, scattering autumn leaves, close to Barnes’s ankles. By the time they get from the far end of the field to where Audrey and I are sitting, the dog has run ahead and tried to trip him three times, but Barnes gives him the football anyway. Barnes stops suddenly, holds the football out as delicately as a hostess offering a demitasse cup, and drops it. The dog, whose name is Bruno, snaps up the football—it is a small sponge rubber model, a toy—and runs off with it. Barnes, who is still panting, sits on the edge of Audrey’s chaise, lifts her foot, and begins to rub her toes through her sock.

“I forgot to tell you that your accountant called when you were chopping wood this morning,” she says. “He called to tell you the name of the contractor who put in his neighbor’s pool. I didn’t know you knew accountants socially.”

“I knew his neighbors,” Barnes says. “They’re different neighbors now. The people I knew were named Matt and Zera Cartwright. Zera was always calling me to ask for Librium. They moved to Kentucky. The accountant kept in touch with them.”

“There’s so much about your life I don’t know,” Audrey says. She pulls off her sock and turns her foot in his hand. The toenails are painted red. The nails on her big toes are perfectly oval. Her heels have the soft skin and roundness of a baby’s foot, which is miraculous to me, because I know she used to wear high heels to work every day in New York. It also amazes me that there are people who still paint their toenails when summer is over.

Predictably, Bruno is trying to bury the football. I once saw Bruno dig a hole for an inner tube, so the football will only be a minute’s trouble. Early in the summer, Barnes came back to the house late at night—he is a surgeon—and gave the dog his black bag. If Audrey hadn’t been less drunk than the rest of us, and able to rescue it, that would have been buried, too.

“Why do we have to build a pool?” Audrey says. “All that horrible construction noise. What if some kid drowns in it? I’m going to wake up every morning and go to the window and expect to see some little body—”

“You knew how materialistic I was when you married me. You knew that after I got a house in the country I’d want a pool, didn’t you?” Barnes kisses her knee. “Audrey can’t swim, Lynn,” he says to me. “Audrey hates to learn new things.”

We already know she can’t swim. She’s Martin’s sister, and I’ve known her for seven years. Martin and I live together—or did until a few months ago, when I moved. Barnes has known her almost all her life, and they’ve been married for six months now. They were married in the living room of this house, while it was still being built, with Elvis Presley on the stereo singing “As Long as I Have You.” Holly carried a bouquet of cobra lilies. Then I sang “Some Day Soon”—Audrey’s favorite Judy Collins song. The dog was there, and a visiting Afghan. The stonemason forgot that he wasn’t supposed to work that day and came just as the ceremony was about to begin, and decided to stay. He turned out to know how to foxtrot, so we were all glad he’d stayed. We had champagne and danced, and Martin and I fixed crêpes.

“What if we just tore the cover off that David Hockney book,” Audrey says now. “The one of the man floating face down in a pool, that makes him look like he’s been pressed under glass? We could hang it from the tree over there, instead of wind chimes. I don’t want a swimming pool.”

Barnes puts her foot down. She lifts the other one and puts it in his hand.

“We can get you a raft and you can float around, and I can rub your feet,” he says.

“You’re never here. You work all the time,” Audrey says.

“When the people come to put in the pool, you can hold up your David Hockney picture and repel them.”

“What if they don’t understand that, Barnes? I can imagine that just causing a lot of confusion.”

“Then you lose,” he says. “If you show them the picture and they go ahead and put in the pool anyway, then either it’s not a real cross or they’re not real vampires.” He pats her ankle. “But no fair explaining to them,” he says. “It has to be as serious as charades.”

Martin tells me things that Barnes has told him. In the beginning, Martin didn’t want his sister to marry him, but Barnes was also his best friend and Martin didn’t want to betray Barnes’s confidences to him, so he asked me what I thought. Telling me mattered less than telling her, and I had impressed him long ago with my ability to keep a secret by not telling him his mother had a mastectomy the summer he went to Italy. He only found out when she died, two years later, and then he found out accidentally. “She didn’t want you to know,” I said. “How could you keep that a secret?” he said. He loves me and hates me for things like that. He loves me because I’m the kind of person people come to. It’s an attribute he wishes he had, because he’s a teacher. He teaches history in a private school. One time, when we were walking through Chelsea late at night, a nicely dressed old lady leaned over her gate and handed me a can of green beans and a can opener and said, “Please.” On the subway, a man handed me a letter and said, “You don’t have to say anything, but please read this paragraph. I just want somebody else to see it before I rip it up.” Most of these things have to do with love, in some odd way. The green beans did not have to do with love.

Martin and I are walking in the woods. The poison ivy is turning a bright autumnal red, so it’s easy to recognize. As we go deeper into the woods we see a tree house, with a ladder made of four boards nailed to the tree trunk. There are empty beer bottles around the tree, but I miss the most remarkable thing in the scene until Martin points it out: a white balloon wedged high above the tree house, where a thin branch forks. He throws some stones and finally bounces one off the balloon, but it doesn’t break it or set it free. “Maybe I can lure it down,” he says, and he picks up an empty Michelob bottle, holds it close to his lips, and taps his fingers on the glass as if he were playing a horn while he blows a slow stream of air across the top. It makes an eerie, hollow sound, and I’m glad when he stops and drops the bottle. He’s capable of surprising me as much as I surprise him. We lived together for years. A month ago, he came to the apartment I was subletting late one night, after two weeks of not returning my phone calls at work and keeping his phone pulled at home—came over and hit the buzzer and was standing there smiling when I looked out the window. He walked up the four flights, came in still smiling, and said, “I’m going to do something you’re really going to like.” I was ready to hit him if he tried to touch me, but he took me lightly by the wrist, so that I knew that was the only part of my body he’d touch, and sat down and pulled me into the chair with him, and whistled the harp break to “Isn’t She Lovely.” I had never heard him whistle before. I had no idea he knew the song. He whistled the long, complex interlude perfectly, and then sat there, silently, his lips warm against the top of my hair.

Martin pushes aside a low-hanging branch, so I can walk by. “You know what Barnes told me this morning?” he says. “He sees his regular shrink on Monday mornings, but a few weeks ago he started seeing a young woman shrink on Tuesdays and not telling either of them about the other. Then he said he was thinking about giving both of them up and buying a camera.”

“I don’t get it.”

“He does that—he starts to say one thing, and then he adds some non sequitur. I don’t know if he wants me to question him or just let him talk.”

“Ask.”

“You wouldn’t ask.”

“I’d probably ask,” I say.

We’re walking on leaves, through bright-green fern. From far away now, he tosses another stone, but it misses the branch; it doesn’t go near the balloon.

“You know what it is?” Martin says. “He never seems vague or random about anything. He graduated first in his class from medical school. All summer, the bastard hit a home run every time he was up at bat. He’s got that charming, self-deprecating way of saying things—the way he was talking about the swimming pool. So when he seems to be opening up to me, it would be unsophisticated for me to ask what going to two shrinks and giving up both of them and buying a camera is all about.”

“Maybe he talks to you because you don’t ask him questions.”

Martin is tossing an acorn in the air. He pockets it, and squeezes my hand.

“I wanted to make love to you last night,” he says, “but I knew she’d be walking through the living room all night.”

She did. She got up every few hours and tiptoed past the foldout bed and went into the bathroom and stayed there, silently, for so long that I’d drift back to sleep and not realize she’d come out until I heard her walking back in again. Audrey has had two miscarriages in the year she’s been with Barnes. Audrey, who swore she’d never leave the city, never have children, who hung out with poets and painters, married the first respectable man she ever dated—her brother’s best friend as well—got pregnant, and grieved when she lost the first baby, grieved when she lost the second.

“Audrey will be all right,” I say, and push my fingers through his.

“We’re the ones I’m worried about,” he says. “Thinking about them stops me from talking about us.” He puts his arm around me as we walk. Our skin is sweaty—we have on too many clothes. We trample ferns I’d avoid if I were walking alone. With his head pressed against my shoulder, he says, “I need for you to talk to me. I’m out of my league with you people. I don’t know what you’re thinking, and I think you must be hating me.”

“I told you what I thought months ago. You said you needed time to think. What more can I do besides move so you have time to think?”

He is standing in front of me, touching the buttons of his wool shirt that I wear as a jacket, then brushing my hair behind my shoulders.

“You went, just like that,” he says. “You won’t tell me what your life is like.”

He moves his face toward mine, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but he only closes his eyes, puts his forehead against mine. “You know all my secrets,” he whispers, “and when we’re apart I feel like they’ve died inside you.”

At dinner, we’ve all had too much to drink. I study Martin’s face across the table and wonder what secrets he had in mind. That he’s afraid of driving over bridges? Afraid of gas stoves? That he can’t tell a Bordeaux from a Burgundy?

Barnes has explained, by drawing a picture on a napkin, how a triple-bypass operation is done. Audrey accidentally knocks over Barnes’s glass, and the drawing of the heart blurs under the spilled water. Martin says, “That’s a penis, Doctor.” Then he scribbles on my napkin, drips water on it, and says, “That is also a penis.” He is pretending to be taking a Rorschach test.

Barnes takes another napkin from the pile in the middle of the table and draws a penis. “What’s that?” he says to Martin.

“That’s a mushroom,” Martin says.

“You’re quite astute,” Barnes says. “I think you should go into medicine when you get over your crisis.”

Martin wads up a napkin and drops it in the puddle running across the table from Barnes’s napkin. “Did you ever have a crisis in your life?” he says to him, mopping up.

“Not that you observed. There were a few weeks when I thought I was going to be second in my class in med school.”

“Aren’t you embarrassed to be such an overachiever?” Martin says, shaking his head in amazement.

“I don’t think about it one way or another. It was expected of me. When I was in high school, I got stropped by my old man for every grade that wasn’t an A.”

“Is that true?” Audrey says. “Your father beat you?”

“It’s true,” Barnes says. “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.” He pours himself some more wine. “I can’t stand pain,” he says. “That’s part of why I went into medicine. Because I think about it all the time anyway, and doing what I do I can be grateful every day that it’s somebody else’s suffering. When I was a resident, I’d go to see the patient after surgery and leave the room and puke. Nurses puke sometimes. You hardly ever see a doctor puke.”

“Did you let anybody comfort you then?” Audrey says. “You don’t let anybody comfort you now.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Barnes says. He takes a drink of wine, raising the glass with such composure that I wouldn’t know he was drunk if he wasn’t looking into the goblet at the same time he was drinking. He puts the glass back on the table. “It’s easier for me to talk to men,” he says. “Men will only go so far, and women are so single-minded about soothing you. I’ve always thought that once I started letting down I might lose my energy permanently. Stay here and float in a swimming pool all day. Read. Drink. Not keep going.”

“Barnes,” Audrey says, “this is awful.” She pushes her bangs back with one hand.

“Christ,” Barnes says, leaning over and taking her hand from her face. “I sound like some character out of D. H. Lawrence. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He gets up. “I’m going to get the other pizza out of the oven.”

On the way into the kitchen, he hits his leg on the coffee table. Geodes rattle on the glass tabletop. On the table, in a wicker tray, there are blue stones, polished amethysts, inky-black pebbles from a stream, marbles with clouds of color like smoke trapped inside. The house is full of things to touch—silk flowers you have to put a finger on to see if they’re real, snow domes to shake, Audrey’s tarot cards. Audrey is looking at Martin now with the same bewildered look that she gets when she lays out the tarot cards and studies them. Martin takes her hand. He is still holding her hand when Barnes comes back, and only lets go when Barnes begins to lower the pizza to the center of the table.

“I’m sorry,” Barnes says. “It’s not a good time to be talking about my problems, is it?”

“Why not?” Martin says. “Everybody’s been their usual witty and clever self all weekend. It’s all right to talk about real things.”

“Well, I don’t want to make a fool of myself anymore,” Barnes says, cutting the pizza into squares. “Why don’t you talk about what it’s like to have lived with Lynn for so many years and then suddenly she’s famous.” Barnes puts a piece of pizza on my plate. He serves a piece to Martin. Audrey holds her fingers above her plate. For a drunken minute, I don’t realize she’s saying she doesn’t want more food—her fingers are hovering lightly, the way they do when she picks up a tarot card.

“Last Monday I put in an all-nighter,” Barnes says to me. “Matty Klein was with me. We were riding down Park Avenue afterwards, and your song came on the radio. We were both so amazed. Not at what we’d just pulled off in five hours of surgery but that there we were in the back of a cab with the sun coming up and you were singing on the radio. I’m still used to the way you were singing with Audrey in the kitchen a while ago—the way you just sing, and she sings along. Then I realized in the cab that that wasn’t private anymore.” He takes another drink of wine. “Am I making any sense?” he says.

“It makes perfect sense,” Martin says. “Try to explain that to her.”

“It’s not private,” I say. “Other things are private, but that’s just me singing a song.”

Barnes pushes his chair back from the table. “I’ll tell you what I never get over,” he says. “That I can take my hands out of somebody’s body, wash them, get in a cab, go home, and hardly wait to get into bed with Audrey to touch her, because that’s so mysterious. In spite of what I do, I haven’t found out anything.”

“Is this leading up to your saying again that you don’t know why I’ve had two miscarriages?” Audrey says.

“No, I wasn’t thinking about that at all,” Barnes says.

“I’ll tell you what I thought it was about,” Martin says. “I thought that Barnes wanted me to tell everybody why I’ve freaked out now that Lynn’s famous. It doesn’t seem very . . . timely of me to be pulling out now.”

“When did I say that what I wanted was to be famous?” I say.

“I can’t do it,” Audrey says. “It’s too hard to pretend to be involved in what other people are talking about when all I can think about are the miscarriages.”

She is the first to cry, though any of us might have been.

Bruno, the dog, has shifting loyalties. Because Martin threw the football for him after dinner, he has settled by our bed in the living room. His sleep is deep, and fitful: paws flapping, hard breaths, a tiny, high-pitched yelp once as he exhales. Martin says that he is having running dreams. I close my eyes and try to imagine Bruno’s dream, but I end up thinking about all the things he probably doesn’t dream about: the blue sky, or the hardness of the field when the ground gets cold. Or, if he noticed those things, they wouldn’t seem sad.

“If I loved somebody else, would that make it easier?” Martin says.

“Do you?” I say.

“No. I’ve thought that that would be a way out, though. That way you could think I was just somebody you’d misjudged.”

“Everybody’s changing so suddenly,” I say. “Do you realize that? All of a sudden Barnes wants to open up to us, and you want to be left alone, and Audrey wants to forget about the life she had in the city and live in this quiet place and have children.”

“What about you?” he says.

“Would it make sense to you that I’ve stopped crying and feeling panicky because I’m in love with somebody else?”

“I’ll bet that’s true,” he says. I feel him stroking the dog. This is what he does to try to quiet him without waking him up—gently rubbing his side with his foot. “Is it true?” he says.

“No. I’d like to hurt you by having it be true, though.”

He reaches for the quilt folded at the foot of the bed and pulls it over the blanket.

“That isn’t like you,” he says.

He stops stroking the dog and turns toward me. “I feel so locked in,” he says. “I feel like we’ve got to come out here every weekend. I feel it’s inevitable that there’s a ‘we.’ I feel guilty for feeling bad, because Barnes’s father beat him up, and my sister lost two babies, and you’ve been putting it all on the line, and I don’t feel like I’m keeping up with you. You’ve all got more energy than I do.”

“Martin—Barnes was dead-drunk, and Audrey was in tears, and before it was midnight I had to admit I was exhausted and go to bed.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “You don’t understand what I mean.”

We are silent, and I can hear the house moving in the wind. Barnes hasn’t put up the storm windows yet. Air leaks in around the windows. I let Martin put his arm around me for the warmth, and I slide lower in the bed so that my shoulders are under the blanket and quilt.

“What I meant is that I’m not entitled to this,” Martin says. “With what he goes through at the hospital, he’s entitled to get blasted on Saturday night. She’s got every right to cry. Your head’s full of music all the time, and that wears you down, even if you aren’t writing or playing.” He whispers, even more quietly, “What did you think when he said that about his father beating him?”

“I wasn’t listening to him any more than you two were. You know me. You know I’m always looking for a reason why it was all right that my father died when I was five. I was thinking maybe it would have turned out awful if he had lived. Maybe I would have hated him for something.”

Martin moves his head closer to mine. “Let me go,” he says, “and I’m going to be as unmovable as that balloon in the tree.”

Bruno whimpers in his sleep, and Martin moves his foot up and down Bruno’s body, half to soothe himself, half to soothe the dog.

I didn’t know my father was dying. I knew that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what dying was. I’ve always known simple things: how to read the letter a stranger hands me and nod, how to do someone a favor when they don’t have my strength. I remember that my father was bending over—stooped with pain, I now realize—and that he was winter-pale, though he died before cold weather came. I remember standing with him in a room that seemed immense to me at the time, in sunlight as intense as the explosion from a flashbulb. If someone had taken that photograph, it would have been a picture of a little girl and her father about to go on a walk. I held my hands out to him, and he pushed the fingers of the gloves tightly down each of my fingers, patiently, pretending to have all the time in the world, saying, “This is the way we get ready for winter.”

Afloat

Annie brings a hand-delivered letter to her father. They stand together on the deck that extends far over the grassy lawn that slopes to the lake, and he reads and she looks off at the water. When she was a little girl she would stand on the metal table pushed to the front of the deck and read the letters aloud to her father. If he sat, she sat. Later, she read them over his shoulder. Now she is sixteen, and she gives him the letter and stares at the trees or the water or the boat bobbing at the end of the dock. It has probably never occurred to her that she does not have to be there when he reads them.Dear Jerome,Last week the bottom fell out of the birdhouse you hung in the tree the summer Annie was three. Or something gnawed at it and the bottom came out. I don’t know. I put the wood under one of the big clay pots full of pansies, just to keep it for old times’ sake. (I’ve given up the fountain pen for a felt-tip. I’m really not a romantic.) I send to you for a month our daughter. She still wears bangs, to cover that little nick in her forehead from the time she fell out of the swing. The swing survived until last summer when—or maybe I told you in last year’s letter—Marcy Smith came by with her “friend” Hamilton, and they were so taken by it that I gave it to them, leaving the ropes dangling. I mean that I gave them the old green swing seat, with the decals of roses even uglier than the scraggly ones we grew. Tell her to pull her bangs back and show the world her beautiful widow’s peak. She now drinks spritzers. For the first two weeks she’s gone I’ll be in Ogunquit with Zack. He is younger than you, but no one will ever duplicate the effect of your slow smile. Have a good summer together. I will be thinking of you at unexpected times (unexpected to me, of course).Love,Anita

He hands the letter on to me, and then pours club soda and Chablis into a tall glass for Annie and fills his own glass with wine alone. He hesitates while I read, and I know he’s wondering whether the letter will disturb me—whether I’ll want club soda or wine. “Soda,” I say. Jerome and Anita have been divorced for ten years.

In these first few days of Annie’s visit, things aren’t going very well. My friends think that it’s just about everybody’s summer story. Rachel’s summers are spent with her ex-husband, and with his daughter by his second marriage, the daughter’s boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s best friend. The golden retriever isn’t there this summer, because last summer he drowned. No one knows how. Jean is letting her optometrist, with whom she once had an affair, stay in her house in the Hamptons on weekends. She stays in town, because she is in love with a chef. Hazel’s the exception. She teaches summer school, and when it ends she and her husband and their son go to Block Island for two weeks, to the house they always rent. Her husband has his job back, after a year in A.A. I study her life and wonder how it works. Of the three best friends I have, she blushes the most easily, is the worst dressed, is the least politically informed, and prefers AM rock stations to FM classical music. Our common denominator is that none of us was married in a church and all of us worried about the results of the blood test we had before we could get a marriage license. But there are so many differences. Say their names to me and what comes to mind is that Rachel cried when she heard Dylan’s Self Portrait album, because, to her, that meant that everything was over; Jean fought off a man in a supermarket parking lot who was intent on raping her, and still has nightmares about the arugula she was going to the store to get; Hazel can recite Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and bring tears to your eyes.

Sitting on the deck, I try to explain to Annie that there should be solidarity between women, but that when you look for a common bond you’re really looking for a common denominator, and you can’t do that with women. Annie puts down My Mother/My Self and looks out at the water.

Jerome and I, wondering when she will ever want to swim, go about our days as usual. She’s gone biking with him, so there’s no hostility. She has always sat at the foot of the bed while Jerome was showering at night and talked nonsense with me while she twisted the ends of her hair, and she still does. At her age, it isn’t important that she’s not in love, and she was once before anyway. When she pours for herself, it’s sixty-forty white wine and club soda. Annie—the baby pushed in a swing. The bottom fell out of the birdhouse. Anita really knows how to hit below the belt.

Jerome is sulky at the end of the week, floating in the Whaler.

“Do you ever think that Anita’s thinking of you?” I ask.

“Telepathy, you mean?” he says. He has a good tan. A scab by his elbow. Somehow, he’s hurt himself. His wet hair is drying in curly strands. He hasn’t had a haircut since we came to the summer house.

“No. Do you ever wonder if she just might be thinking about you?”

“I don’t think about her,” he says.

“You read the letter Annie brings you every year.”

“I’m curious.”

“Just curious for that one brief minute?”

Yes, he nods. “Notice that I’m always the one that opens the junk mail, too,” he says.

According to Jerome, he and Anita gradually drifted apart. Or, at times when he blames himself, he says it’s because he was still a child when he married her. He married her the week of his twentieth birthday. He says that his childhood wounds still weren’t healed; Anita was Mama, she was the person he always felt he had to prove himself to—the stuff any psychiatrist will run down for you, he says now, trailing his hand in the water. “It’s like there was a time in your life when you believed in paste,” he says. “Think how embarrassed you’d be to go buy paste today. Now it’s rubber cement. Or at least Elmer’s glue. When I was young I just didn’t know things.”

I never had any doubt when things ended with my first husband. We knew things were wrong; we were going to a counselor and either biting our tongues or arguing because we’d loosened them with too much alcohol, trying to pretend that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t have a baby. One weekend Dan and I went to Saratoga, early in the spring, to visit friends. It was all a little too sun-dappled. Too House Beautiful, the way the sun, in the early morning, shone through the lace curtains and paled the walls to polka dots of light. The redwood picnic table on the stone-covered patio was as bright in the sunlight as if it had been waxed. We were drinking iced tea, all four of us out in the yard early in the morning, amazed at what a perfect day it was, how fast the garden was growing, how huge the heads of the peonies were. Then some people stopped by, with their little girl—people new to Saratoga, who really had no friends there yet. The little girl was named Alison, and she took a liking to Dan—came up to him without hesitation, the way a puppy that’s been chastised will instantly choose someone in the room to cower by or a bee will zero in on one member of a group. She came innocently, the way a child would come, fascinated by . . . by his curly hair? The way the sunlight reflected off the rims of his glasses? The wedding ring on his hand as he rested his arm on the picnic table? And then, as the rest of us talked there was a squealing game, with the child suddenly climbing from the ground to his lap, some whispering, some laughing, and then the child, held around her middle, raised above his head, parallel to the ground. The game went on and on with cries of “Again!” and “Higher!” until the child was shrill and Dan complained of numb arms, and for a second I looked away from the conversation the rest of us were having and I saw her raised above him, smiling down, and Dan both frowning and amused—that little smile at the edge of his lips—and the child’s mouth, wide with delight, her long blond hair flopped forward. He was keeping her raised off the ground, and she was hoping that it would never end, and in that second I knew that for Dan and me it was over.

We took a big bunch of pink peonies back to the city with us, stuck in a glass jar with water in the bottom that I held wedged between my feet. I had on a skirt, and the flowers flopped as we went over the bumpy road and the sensation I felt was amazing: it wasn’t a tickle, but a pain. When he stopped for gas I went into the bathroom and cried and washed my face and dried it on one of those brown paper towels that smell more strongly than any perfume. I combed my hair. When I was sure I looked fine I came back to the car and sat down, putting one foot on each side of the jar. He started to drive out of the gas station, and then he just drifted to a stop. It was still sunny. Late afternoon. We sat there with the sun heating us and other cars pulling around our car, and he said, “You are impossible. You are so emotional. After a perfect day, what have you been crying about?” Then there were tears, and since I said nothing, eventually he started to drive: out into the merging lane, then onto the highway, speeding all the way back to New York in silence. It was already over. The only other thing I remember about that day is that down by Thirty-fourth Street we saw the same man who had been there the week before, selling roses guaranteed to smell sweet and to be everlasting. There he was, in the same place, his roses on a stand behind him.

We swim, and gradually work our way back to the gunwale of the Whaler: six hands, white-knuckled, holding the rim. I slide along, hand over hand, then move so that my body touches Jerome’s from behind. With my arms around his chest, I kiss his neck. He turns and smiles and kisses me. Then I kick away and go to where Annie is holding on to the boat, her cheek on her hands, staring at her father. I swim up to her, push her wet bangs to one side, and kiss her forehead. She looks aggravated, and turns her head away. Just as quickly, she turns it back. “Am I interrupting you two getting it on out here?” she says.

“I kissed both of you,” I say, between them again, feeling the weightlessness of my legs dangling as I hold on.

She continues to stare at me. “Girls kissing girls is so dumb,” she says. “It’s like the world’s full of stupid hostesses who graduated from Sweet Briar.”

Jerome looks at her silently for a long time.

“I guess your mother’s not very demonstrative,” he says.

“Were you ever?” she says. “Did you love Anita when you had me?”

“Of course I did,” he says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I know,” she says, as angry and petulant as a child. “How come you don’t feed me birdseed?” she says. “How come you don’t feed the carrier pigeon?”

He pauses until he understands what she is talking about. “The letters just go one way,” he says.

“Do you have too much dignity to answer them, or is it too risky to reveal anything?”

“Honey,” he says, lowering his voice, “I don’t have anything to say.”

“That you loved her and now you don’t?” she says. “That’s what isn’t worth saying?”

He’s brought his knees up to his chin. The scab by his elbow is pale when he clasps his arm around his knees.

“Well, I think that’s bullshit,” she says. She looks at me. “And I think you’re bullshit, too. You don’t care about the bond between women. You just care about hanging on to him. When you kissed me, it was patronizing.”

There are tears now. Tears that are ironic, because there is so much water everywhere. Today she’s angry and alone, and I float between them knowing exactly how each one feels and, like the little girl Alison suspended above Dan’s head, knowing that desire that can be more overwhelming than love—the desire, for one brief minute, simply to get off the earth.

Girl Talk

Barbara is in her chaise. Something is wrong with the pool—everything is wrong with the pool—so it has not been filled with water. The green-painted bottom is speckled with goldenrod and geranium petals. The neighbor’s cat sits licking a paw under the shade of the little mimosa tree planted in one of the raised boxes at one corner of the pool.

“Take a picture of that,” Barbara says, putting her hand on top of her husband Sven’s wrist. He is her fourth husband. They have been married for two years. She speaks to him exactly the way she spoke to her third husband. “Take a picture of a kitty licking its paw, Sven.”

“I don’t have my camera,” he says.

“You usually always have it with you,” she says. She lights an Indonesian cigarette—a kretek—waves out the match and drops it in a little green dish full of cherry pits. She turns to me and says, “If he’d had his camera last Friday, he could have photographed the car that hit the what-do-you-call-it—the concrete thing that goes down the middle of the highway. They were washing up the blood.”

Sven gets up. He slips into his white thongs and flaps down the flagstone walk to the kitchen. He goes in and closes the door.

“How is your job, Oliver?” Barbara asks. Oliver is Barbara’s son, but she hardly ever sees him.

“Air-conditioned,” Oliver says. “They’ve finally got the air-conditioning up to a decent level in the building this summer.”

“How is your job?” Barbara says to me.

I look at her, at Oliver.

“What job are you thinking of, Mother?” he says.

“Oh—painting wicker white, or something. Painting the walls yellow. If you’d had amniocentesis, you could paint them blue or pink.”

“We’re leaving up the wallpaper,” Oliver says. “Why would a thirty-year-old woman have amniocentesis?”

“I hate wicker,” I say. “Wicker is for Easter baskets.”

Barbara stretches. “Notice the way it goes?” she says. “I ask a simple question, he answers for you, as if you’re helpless now that you’re pregnant, and that gives you time to think and zing back some snappy reply.”

“I think you’re the Queen of Snappiness,” Oliver says to her.

“Like the Emperor of Ice Cream?” She puts down her Dutch detective novel. “I never did understand Wallace Stevens,” she says. “Do any of you?”

Sven has come back with his camera and is focusing. The cat has walked away, but he wasn’t focusing on the cat anyway; it’s a group shot: Barbara in her tiny white bikini, Oliver in cut-off jeans, with the white raggedy strings trailing down his tan legs, and me in my shorts and baggy embroidered top that my huge stomach bulges hard against.

“Smile,” Sven says. “Do I really have to say smile?”

This is the weekend of Barbara’s sixtieth birthday, and Oliver’s half brother Craig has also come for the occasion. He has given her an early present: a pink T-shirt that says “60.” Oliver and I brought Godivas and a hair comb with a silk lily glued to it. Sven will give her a card and some orchids, flown in from some unimaginably far-off place, and a check. She will express shock at the check and not show anyone the amount, though she will pass around his birthday card. At dinner, the orchids will be in a vase, and Sven will tell some anecdote about a shoot he once went on in some faraway country.

Craig has brought two women with him, unexpectedly. They are tall, blond, silent, and look like twins but are not. Their clothes are permeated with marijuana. When they were introduced, one was wearing a Sony Walkman and the other had a tortoiseshell hair ornament in the shape of a turtle.

Now it is getting dark and we are all having spritzers. I have had too many spritzers. I feel that everyone is looking at everyone else’s naked feet. The twins who are not twins have baby toes that curl under, so you can see the plum-colored polish on only four toes. Craig has square toenails and calluses on his heels which come from playing tennis. Oliver’s long, tan feet are rubbing my legs. The dryness of his soles feels wonderful as he rubs his feet up and down the sticky sweat that has dried on my calves. Barbara has long toenails, painted bronze. Sven’s big toes are oblong and shapeless, the way balloons look when you first begin to blow them up. My toenails aren’t polished, because I can hardly bend over. I look at Oliver’s feet and mine and try to imagine a composite baby foot. As Sven pours, it is the first time I realize that my drink is gone and I have been crunching ice.

In our bedroom, Oliver cups his hands around my hard stomach as I lie on my side facing away from him and kisses my hair from underneath, slowly moving down my spine to where his lips rest on one hipbone.

“My glass of ice water just made a ring on the night table,” he says. He takes a sip of water. I hear him sigh and put the glass back on the table.

“I want to get married,” I mumble into the pillow. “I don’t want to end up bitter, like Barbara.”

He snorts. “She’s bitter because she kept getting married, and when the last one died he left almost everything to Craig. She’s bored with Sven, now that his pictures aren’t selling anymore.”

“Oliver,” I say, and am surprised at how helpless I sound. “You sounded like your mother just then. At least talk sense to me.”

Oliver slides his cheek to my buttock. “Remember the first time you rubbed my back and it felt so good that I started laughing?” Oliver says. “And you didn’t know why I was doing it and you got insulted? And the time you got drunk and sang along with Eddie Fisher on ‘Wish You Were Here’ and you were so good I laughed until I got the hiccups?” He rolls over. “We’re married,” he says. He slides his cheek to the hollow of my back. “Let me tell you what happened on the crosstown bus last week,” he goes on. “A messenger got on. Twenty or so. Carrying a pile of envelopes. Started talking CB chatter to the baby on the lap of a woman sitting next to him. The woman and the baby got off at Madison, and between there and Third he started addressing the bus in general. He said, ‘Everybody’s heard of pie in the sky. They say Smokey in the Sky. Smokey the Bear’s what they call the cops. But you know what I say? I say Bear in the Air. It’s like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—LSD. LSD is acid.’ He had on running shoes and jeans and a white button-down shirt with a tie hanging around his neck.”

“Why did you tell me that story?” I say.

“Anybody can get it together to do something perfunctory. The minute that messenger got off the bus he tied that tie and delivered that crap he was carrying.” He turns again, sighs. “I can’t talk about marriage in this crazy house. Let’s walk on the beach.”

“It’s so late,” I say. “It must be after midnight. I’m exhausted from sitting all day, drinking and doing nothing.”

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he whispers. “I can’t stand to hear Barbara and Sven making love.”

I listen, wondering if he’s putting me on. “That’s mice running through the walls,” I say.

Sunday afternoon, and Barbara and I are walking the beach, a little tipsy after our picnic lunch. I wonder what she’d think if I told her that her son and I are not married. She gives the impression that what she hasn’t lived through she has imagined. And much of what she says comes true. She said the pool would crack; she warned Craig that the girls weren’t to be trusted, and, sure enough, this morning they were gone, taking with them the huge silver bowl she keeps lemons and limes in, a silver meat platter with coiled-serpent handles, and four silver ladles—almost as if they’d planned some bizarre tea party for themselves. He’d met them, he said, at Odeon, in the city. That was his explanation. Craig is the only person I know who gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, and takes a Valium blue. Now we have left him playing a game called Public Assistance with Sven, at the side of the pool. Oliver was still upstairs sleeping when I came down at eleven. “I’ll marry you,” he said sleepily as I climbed out of bed. “I had a dream that I didn’t and we were always unhappy.”

I am in the middle of rambling on to Barbara, telling her that Oliver’s dreams amaze me. They seem to be about states of feeling; they don’t have any symbols in them, or even moments. He wakes up and his dreams have summarized things. I want to blurt out, “We lied to you, years ago. We said we got married, and we didn’t. We had a fight and a flat tire and it rained, and we checked into an inn and just never got married.”

“My first husband, Cadby, collected butterflies,” she says. “I could never understand that. He’d stand by a little window in our bedroom—we had a basement apartment in Cambridge, just before the war—and he’d hold the butterflies in the frames to the light, as if the way the light struck them told him something their wings wouldn’t have if they’d flown by.” She looks out to the ocean. “Not that there were butterflies flying around Cambridge,” she says. “I just realized that.”

I laugh.

“Not what you were talking about at all?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Lately I catch myself talking just to distract myself. Nothing seems real but my body, and my body is so heavy.”

She smiles at me. She has long auburn hair, streaked with white, and curly bangs that blow every which way, like the tide foaming into pools.

Both sons, she has just told me, were accidents. “Now I’m too old, and for the first time I’d like to do it again. I envy men for being able to conceive children late in life. You know that picture of Picasso and his son, Claude? Robert Capa took it. It’s in Sven’s darkroom—the postcard of it, tacked up. They’re on the beach, and the child is being held forward, bigger than its father, rubbing an eye. Being held by Picasso, simply smiling and rubbing an eye.”

“What wine was that we drank?” I say, tracing a heart in the sand with my big toe.

“La Vieille Ferme blanc,” she says. “Nothing special.” She picks up a shell—a small mussel shell, black outside, opalescent inside. She drops it carefully into one cup of her tiny bikini top. In her house are ferns, in baskets on the floor, and all around them on top of the soil sit little treasures: bits of glass, broken jewelry, shells, gold twine. One of the most beautiful is an asparagus fern that now cascades over a huge circle of exposed flashbulbs stuck in the earth; each summer I gently lift the branches and peek, the way I used to go to my grandmother’s summer house and open her closet to see if the faint pencil markings of the heights of her grandchildren were still there.

“You love him?” she says.

In five years, it is the first time we have ever really talked.

Yes, I nod.

“I’ve had four husbands. I’m sure you know that—that’s my claim to fame, and ridicule, forever. But the first died, quite young. Hodgkin’s disease. There’s a seventy-percent cure now, I believe, for Hodgkin’s disease. The second one left me for a lady cardiologist. You knew Harold. And now you know Sven.” She puts another shell in her bikini, centering it over her nipple. “Actually, I only had two chances out of four. Sven would like a little baby he could hold in front of his face on the beach, but I’m too old. The body of a thirty-year-old, and I’m too old.”

I kick sand, look at the ocean. I feel too full, too woozy, but I’m getting desperate to walk, to move faster.

“Do you think Oliver and Craig will ever like each other?” I say.

She shrugs. “Oh—I don’t want to talk about them. It’s my birthday, and I want to talk girl talk. Maybe I’ll never talk to you this way again.”

“Why?” I say.

“I’ve always had . . . feelings about things. Sven made fun of me when I said at Christmas that the pool would crack. I knew both times I was pregnant I’d have boys. I so much didn’t want a second child, but now I’m glad I had him. He’s more intelligent than Craig. On my deathbed, Craig will probably bring some woman to the house who’ll steal the covers.” She bends and picks up a shiny stone, throws it into the water. “I didn’t love my first husband,” she says.

“Why didn’t you?”

“His spirit was dying. His spirit was dying before he got sick and died.” She runs her hand across her bare stomach. “People your age don’t talk that way, do they? We fought, and I left him, and that was in the days when young ladies did not leave young men. I got an apartment in New York, and for so many weeks I was all right—my mother sent all the nice ladies she knew over to amuse me, and it was such a relief not to have to cope. That was also in the days when young men didn’t cry, and he’d put his head on my chest and cry about things I couldn’t understand. Look at me now, with this body. I’m embarrassed by the irony of it—the dry pool, the useless body. It’s too obvious even to talk about it. I sound like T. S. Eliot, with his bank-clerk self-pity, don’t I?” She is staring at the ocean. “When I thought everything was in order—I even had a new beau—I was trying to hang a picture one morning: a painting of a field of little trees, with a doe walking through. I had it positioned where I thought it should go, and I held it to the wall and backed up, but I couldn’t quite tell, because I couldn’t back up enough. I didn’t have any husband to hold it to the wall. I dropped it and broke the glass and cried.” She pushes her hair back, twines the rubber band she has worn on her wrist around her hair again. Through her bikini I can see the outline of the shells. Her hands hang at her sides. “We’ve come too far,” she says. “Aren’t you exhausted?”

We are almost up to the Davises’ house. That means that we’ve walked about three miles, and through my heaviness I feel a sort of light-headedness. I’m thinking, I’m tired but it doesn’t matter. Being married doesn’t matter. Knowing how to talk about things matters. I sink down in the sand, like a novice with a revelation. Barbara looks concerned; then, a little drunkenly, I watch her face change. She’s decided that I’m just responding, taking a rest. A seagull dives, gets what it wants. We sit next to each other facing the water, her flat tan stomach facing the ocean like a mirror.

It is night, and we are still outdoors, beside the pool. Sven’s face has a flickery, shadowed look, like a jack-o’-lantern’s. A citronella candle burns on the white metal table beside his chair.

“He decided not to call the police,” Sven says. “I agree. Since those two young ladies obviously did not want your crappy silver, they’re saddled with sort of pirates’ treasure, and, as we all know, pirate ships sink.”

“You’re going to wait?” Barbara says to Craig. “How will you get all our silver back?”

Craig is tossing a tennis ball up and down. It disappears into the darkness, then slaps into his hands again. “You know what?” he says. “One night I’ll run into them at Odeon. That’s the thing—nothing is ever the end.”

“Well, this is my birthday, and I hope we don’t have to talk about things ending.” Barbara is wearing her pink T-shirt, which seems to have shrunk in the wash. Her small breasts are visible beneath it. She has on white pedal pushers and has kicked off her black patent-leather sandals.

“Happy birthday,” Sven says, and takes her hand.

I reach out and take Oliver’s hand. The first time I met his family I cried. I slept on their foldout sofa and drank champagne and watched The Lady Vanishes on TV, and during the night he crept downstairs to hold me, and I was crying. I had short hair then. I can remember his hand closing around it, crushing it. Now it hangs long and thin, and he moves it gently, pushing it aside. I can’t remember the last time I cried. When I first met her, Barbara surprised me because she was so sharp-tongued. Now I have learned that it is their dull lives that make people begin to say cutting things.

I look over my shoulder at the beach at night—sand bleached white by the light of the moon, foamy waves silently washing ashore, a hollow sound from the wind all over, like the echo of a conch shell held against the ear. The roar in my head is all from pain. All day, the baby has been kicking and kicking, and now I know that the heaviness I felt earlier, the disquiet, must be labor. It’s almost a full month early—labor coupled with danger. I keep my hands away from my stomach, as if it might quiet itself. Sven opens a bottle of club soda and it gushes into the tall glass pitcher that sits on the table between his chair and Barbara’s. He begins to unscrew the cork in a bottle of white wine. Inside me, once, making my stomach pulse, the baby turns over. I concentrate, desperately, on the first thing I see. I focus on Sven’s fingers and count them, as though my baby were born and now I have to look for perfection. There is every possibility that my baby will be loved and cared for and will grow up to be like any of these people. Another contraction, and I reach out for Oliver’s hand but stop in time and stroke it, don’t squeeze.

I am really at some out-of-the-way beach house, with a man I am not married to and people I do not love, in labor.

Sven squeezes a lemon into the pitcher. Smoky drops fall into the soda and wine. I smile, the first to hold out my glass. Pain is relative.

Like Glass

In the picture, only the man is looking at the camera. The baby in the chair, out on the lawn, is looking in another direction, not at his father. His father has a grip on a collie—trying, no doubt, to make the dog turn its head toward the lens. The dog looks away, no space separating its snout from the white border. I wonder why, in those days, photographs had borders that looked as if they had been cut with pinking shears.

The collie is dead. The man with a pompadour of curly brown hair and with large, sloping shoulders was alive, the last time I heard. The baby grew up and became my husband and now is no longer married to me. I am trying to follow his line of vision in the picture. Obviously, he’d had enough of paying attention to his father or to the dog that day. It is a picture of a baby gazing into the distance.

I have a lot of distinct memories of things that happened while I was married, but lately I’ve been thinking about two things that are similar, although they have nothing in common. We lived on the top floor of a brownstone. When we decided to separate and I moved out, Paul changed the lock on the door. When I came back to take my things, there was no way to get them. I went away and thought about it until I didn’t feel angry anymore. By then it was winter, and cold leaked in my windows. I had my daughter, and other things, to think about. In the cold, though, walking around the apartment in a sweater most people would have thought thick enough to wear outside, or huddling on the sofa under an old red-and-brown afghan, I would start feeling romantic about my husband.

One afternoon—it was February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day—I had a couple of drinks and put on my long green coat with a huge hood that made me look like a monk and went to the window and saw that the snow had melted on the sidewalk: I could get away with wearing my comfortable rubber-soled sandals with thick wool socks. So I went out and stopped at Sheridan Square to buy Hamlet and flipped through until I found what I was looking for. Then I went to our old building and buzzed Larry. He lives in the basement—what is called a garden apartment. He opened the door and unlocked the high black iron gate. My husband had always said that Larry looked and acted like Loretta Young; he was always exuberant, he had puffy hair and crinkly eyes, and he didn’t look as if he belonged to either sex. Larry was surprised to see me. I can be charming when I want to be, so I acted slightly bumbly and apologetic and smiled to let him know that what I was asking was a silly thing: could I stand in his garden for a minute and call out a poem to my husband? I saw Larry looking at my hands, moving in the pockets of my coat. The page torn from Hamlet was in one pocket, the rest of the book in the other. Larry laughed. How could my husband hear me, he asked. It was February. There were storm windows. But he let me in, and I walked down his long, narrow hallway, through the back room that he used as an office, to the door that led out to the back garden. I pushed open the door, and his gray poodle came yapping up to my ankles. It looked like a cactus, with maple leaves stuck in its coat.

I picked up a little stone—Larry had small rocks bordering his walkway, all touching, as if they were a chain. I threw the stone at my husband’s fourth-floor bedroom window, and hit it—tonk!—on the very first try. Blurrily, I watched the look of puzzlement on Larry’s face. My real attention was on my husband’s face, when it appeared at the window, full of rage, then wonder. I looked at the torn-out page and recited, liltingly, Ophelia’s song: “ ‘Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day / All in the morning betime, / And I a maid at your window, / To be your Valentine.’ ”

“Are you insane?” Paul called down to me. It was a shout, really, but his voice hung thin in the air. It floated down.

“I did it,” Larry said, coming out, shivering, cowering as he looked up to the fourth floor. “I let her in.”

I could smell jasmine when the wind blew. I had put on too much perfume. Even if he did take me in, he’d back off; he’d never let me be his valentine. What he noticed, of course, when he’d come downstairs to lead me out of the garden, seconds later, was the Scotch on my breath.

“This is all wrong,” I said, as he pulled me by the hand past Larry, who stood holding his barking poodle in the hallway. “I only had two Scotches,” I said. “I just realized when the wind blew that I smell like a flower garden.”

“You bet it’s all wrong,” he said, squeezing my hand so hard it almost broke. Then he shook off my hand and walked up the steps, went in and slammed the door behind him. I watched a hairline crack leap across all four panes of glass at the top of the door.

The other thing happened in happier times, when we were visiting my sister, Karin, on Twenty-third Street. It was the first time we had met Dan, the man she was engaged to, and we had brought a bottle of champagne. We drank her wine first, and ate her cheese and told stories and heard stories and smoked a joint, and sometime after midnight my husband went to the refrigerator and got out our wine—Spanish champagne, in a black bottle. He pointed the bottle away from him, and we all squinted, silently watching. At the same instant that the cork popped, as we were all saying “Hooray!” or “That does it!”—whatever we were saying—we heard glass raining down, and Paul suddenly crouched, and then we looked above him to see a hole in the skylight, and through the hole black sky.

I’ve just told these stories to my daughter, Eliza, who is six. She used to like stories to end with a moral, like fairy tales, but now she thinks that’s kid’s stuff. She still wants to know what stories mean, but now she wants me to tell her. The point of the two stories—well, I don’t know what the point is, I’m always telling her. That he broke the glass by mistake, and that the cork broke the glass by a miracle. The point is that broken glass is broken glass.

“That’s a joke ending,” she says. “It’s dumb.” She frowns.

I cop out, too tired to think, and then tell her another part of the story to distract her: Uncle Dan and Aunt Karin told the superintendent that the hole must have come from something that fell from above. He knew they were lying—nothing was above them—but what could he say? He asked them whether they thought perhaps meteorites shrank to the size of gumballs falling through New York’s polluted air. He hated not only his tenants but the whole city.

She watches me digress. She reaches for the cologne on her night table and lifts her long blond hair, and I spray her neck. She takes the bottle and sprays her wrists, rubs them together, holds out her wrists for me to smell. I make a silly face and pretend to be dazed by such a wonderful smell. I stroke her hair until she is silent, and tiptoe out, still moving as if I’m walking through broken glass.

Once a week, for a couple of hours, I read to a man named Norman, who is blind. In the year I’ve been doing it, he and I have sort of become friends. He usually greets me with something like “So what’s new with your life?” He sits behind his desk and I sit beside it, in a chair. This is the way a teacher and pupil should sit, and I’ve fallen into the pattern of letting him ask.

He gets up to open the window. It’s always too hot in his little office. His movements are exaggerated, like a bird’s: the quickly cocked head, the way he grips the edge of his desk when he’s bored. He grips the edge, releases his hold, grabs again, like a parrot shifting on its bar. Norman has never seen a bird. He has an eight-year-old daughter, who likes to describe things to him, although she is a prankster and sometimes deliberately lies, he has told me. He buys her things from the joke shop on the corner of the street where he works. He takes home little pills that will make drinks bubble over, buzzers to conceal in the palm of your hand, little black plastic flies to freeze in ice cubes, rubber eyeglass rims attached to a fat nose and a bushy mustache. “Daddy, now I’m wearing my big nose,” she says. “Daddy, I put a black fly in your ice cube, so spit it out if it sinks in your drink, all right?” My daughter and I have gone to two dinners at their house. My daughter thinks that his daughter is a little weird. The last time we visited, when the girls were playing and Norman was washing dishes, his wife showed me the hallway she had just wallpapered. It took her forever to decide on the wallpaper, she told me. We stood there, dwarfed by wallpaper imprinted with the trunks of shiny silver trees that her husband would never see.

What’s new with me? My divorce is final.

My husband remembers the circumstances of the photograph. I told him it was impossible—he was an infant. No, he was a child when the picture was taken, he said—he just looked small because he was slumped in the chair. He remembers it all distinctly. Rufus the dog was there, and his father, and he was looking slightly upward because that was where his mother was, holding the camera. I was amazed that I had made a mystery of something that had such a simple answer. It is a picture of a baby looking at its mother. For the millionth time he asks why must I make myself morose, why call in the middle of the night.

Eliza is asleep. I sit on the edge of her bed in the half-darkness, tempting fate, fidgeting with a paperweight with bursts of red color inside, tossing it in the air. One false move and she will wake up. One mistake and glass shatters. I like the smoothness of it, the heaviness as it slaps into my palm over and over.

Today when I went to Norman, he was sitting on his window ledge, with his arms crossed over his chest. He had been uptown at a meeting that morning, where a man had come up to him and said, “Be grateful for the cane. Everybody who doesn’t take hold of something has something take hold of them.” Norman tells me this, and we are both silent. Does he want me to tell him, the way Eliza wants me to summarize stories, what I think it means? Since Norman and I are adults, I answer my silent question with another question: What do you do with a shard of sorrow?

Desire

Bryce was sitting at the kitchen table in his father’s house, cutting out a picture of Times Square. It was a picture from a coloring book, but Bryce wasn’t interested in coloring; he just wanted to cut out pictures so he could see what they looked like outside the book. This drawing was of people crossing the street between the Sheraton-Astor and F. W. Woolworth. There were also other buildings, but these were the ones the people seemed to be moving between. The picture was round; it was supposed to look as if it had been drawn on a bottle cap. Bryce had a hard time getting the scissors around the edge of the cap, because they were blunt-tipped. At home, at his mother’s house in Vermont, he had real scissors and he was allowed to taste anything, including alcohol, and his half sister Maddy was a lot more fun than Bill Monteforte, who lived next door to his father here in Pennsylvania and who never had time to play. But he had missed his father, and he had been the one who called to invite himself to this house for his spring vacation.

His father, B.B., was standing in the doorway now, complaining because Bryce was so quiet and so glum. “It took quite a few polite letters to your mother to get her to let loose of you for a week,” B.B. said. “You get here and you go into a slump. It would be a real problem if you had to do anything important, like go up to bat with the bases loaded and two outs.”

“Mom’s new neighbor is the father of a guy that plays for the Redskins,” Bryce said.

The scissors slipped. Since he’d ruined it, Bryce now cut on the diagonal, severing half the people in Times Square from the other half. He looked out the window and saw a squirrel stealing seed from the bird feeder. The gray birds were so tiny anyway, it didn’t look as if they needed anything to eat.

“Are we going to that auction tonight, or what?” Bryce said.

“Maybe. It depends on whether Rona gets over her headache.”

B.B. sprinkled little blue and white crystals of dishwasher soap into the machine and closed it. He pushed two buttons and listened carefully.

“Remember now,” he said, “I don’t want you getting excited at the auction if you see something you want. You put your hand up, and that’s a bid. You have to really, really want something and then ask me before you put your hand up. You can’t shoot your hand up. Imagine that you’re a soldier down in the trenches and there’s a war going on.”

“I don’t even care about the dumb auction,” Bryce said.

“What if there was a Turkish prayer rug you wanted and it had the most beautiful muted colors you’d ever seen in your life?” B.B. sat down in the chair across from Bryce. The back of the chair was in the shape of an upside-down triangle. The seat was a right-side-up triangle. The triangles were covered with aqua plastic. B.B. shifted on the chair. Bryce could see that he wanted an answer.

“Or we’ll play Let’s Pretend,” B.B. said. “Let’s pretend a lion is coming at you and there’s a tree with a cheetah in it and up ahead of you it’s just low dry grass. Would you climb the tree, or start running?”

“Neither,” Bryce said.

“Come on. You’ve either got to run or something. There’s known dangers and unknown dangers. What would you do?”

“People can’t tell what they’d do in a situation like that,” Bryce said.

“No?”

“What’s a cheetah?” Bryce said. “Are you sure they get in trees?”

B.B. frowned. He had a drink in his hand. He pushed the ice cube to the bottom and they both watched it bob up. Bryce leaned over and reached into the drink and gave it a push, too.

“No licking that finger,” B.B. said.

Bryce wiped a wet streak across the red down vest he wore in the house.

“Is that my boy? ‘Don’t lick your finger,’ he takes the finger and wipes it on his clothes. Now he can try to remember what he learned in school from the Book of Knowledge about cheetahs.”

“What Book of Knowledge?”

His father got up and kissed the top of his head. The radio went on upstairs, and then water began to run in the tub up there.

“She must be getting ready for action,” B.B. said. “Why does she have to take a bath the minute I turn on the dishwasher? The dishwasher’s been acting crazy.” B.B. sighed. “Keep those hands on the table,” he said. “It’s good practice for the auction.”

Bryce moved the two half circles of Times Square so that they overlapped. He folded his hands over them and watched the squirrel scare a bird away from the feeder. The sky was the color of ash, with little bursts of white where the sun had been.

“I’m the same as dead,” Rona said.

“You’re not the same as dead,” B.B. said. “You’ve put five pounds back on. You lost twenty pounds in that hospital, and you didn’t weigh enough to start with. You wouldn’t eat anything they brought you. You took an intravenous needle out of your arm. I can tell you, you were nuts, and I didn’t have much fun talking to that doctor who looked like Tonto who operated on you and thought you needed a shrink. It’s water over the dam. Get in the bath.”

Rona was holding on to the sink. She started to laugh. She had on tiny green-and-white striped underpants. Her long white nightgown was hung around her neck, the way athletes drape towels around themselves in locker rooms.

“What’s funny?” he said.

“You said, ‘It’s water over the—’ Oh, you know what you said. I’m running water in the tub, and—”

“Yeah,” B.B. said, closing the toilet seat and sitting down. He picked up a Batman comic and flipped through. It was wet from moisture. He hated the feel of it.

The radio was on the top of the toilet tank, and now the Andrews Sisters were singing “Hold Tight.” Their voices were as smooth as toffee. He wanted to pull them apart, to hear distinct voices through the perfect harmony.

He watched her get into the bath. There was a worm of a scar, dull red, to the left of her jutting hipbone, where they had removed her appendix. One doctor had thought it was an ectopic pregnancy. Another was sure it was a ruptured ovary. A third doctor—her surgeon—insisted it was her appendix, and they got it just in time. The tip had ruptured.

Rona slid low in the bathtub. “If you can’t trust your body not to go wrong, what can you trust?” she said.

“Everybody gets sick,” he said. “It’s not your body trying to do you in. The mind’s only one place: in your head. Look, didn’t Lyndon Johnson have an appendectomy? Remember how upset people were that he pulled up his shirt to show the scar?”

“They were upset because he pulled his dog’s ears,” she said.

She had a bath toy he had bought for her. It was a fish with a happy smile. You wound it with a key and then it raced around the tub spouting water through its mouth.

He could hear Bryce talking quietly downstairs. Another call to Maddy, no doubt. When the boy was in Vermont, he was on the phone all the time, telling B.B. how much he missed him; when he was here in Pennsylvania, he missed his family in Vermont. The phone bill was going to be astronomical. Bryce kept calling Maddy, and Rona’s mother kept calling from New York; Rona never wanted to take the calls because she always ended up in an argument if she wasn’t prepared with something to talk about, so she made B.B. say she was asleep, or in the tub, or that a soufflé was in the last stages. Then she’d call her mother back, when she’d gathered her thoughts.

“Would you like to go to that auction tonight?” he said to Rona.

“An auction? What for?”

“I don’t know. There’s nothing on TV and the kid’s never been to an auction.”

“The kid’s never smoked grass,” she said, soaping her arm.

“Neither do you anymore. Why would you bring that up?”

“You can look at his rosy cheeks and sad-clown eyes and know he never has.”

“Right,” he said, throwing the comic book back on the tile. “Right. My kid’s not a pothead. I was talking about going to an auction. Would you also like to tell me that elephants don’t fly?”

She laughed and slipped lower in the tub, until the water reached her chin. With her hair pinned to the top of her head and the foam of bubbles covering her neck, she looked like a lady in Edwardian times. The fish was in a frenzy, cutting through the suds. She moved a shoulder to accommodate it, shifted her knees, tipped her head back.

“There were flying elephants in those books that used to be all over the house when he visited,” she said. “I’m so glad he’s eight now. All those crazy books.”

“You were stoned all the time,” he said. “Everything looked funny to you.” Though he hadn’t gotten stoned with her, sometimes things had seemed peculiar to him, too. There was the night his friends Shelby and Charles had given a dramatic reading of a book of Bryce’s called Bertram and the Ticklish Rhinoceros. Rona’s mother had sent her a loofah for Christmas that year. It was before you saw loofahs all over the place. Vaguely, he could remember six people crammed into the bathroom, cheering as the floating loofah expanded in water.

“What do you say about the auction?” he said. “Can you keep your hands still? That’s what I told him was essential—hands in lap.”

“Come here,” she said, “I’ll show you what I can do with my hands.”

The auction was in a barn heated with two wood stoves—one in front, one in back. There were also a few electric heaters up and down the aisles. When B.B. and Rona and Bryce came in the back door of the barn, a man in a black-and-red lumberman’s jacket closed it behind them, blowing cigar smoke in their faces. A woman and a man and two teenagers were arguing about a big cardboard box. Apparently one of the boys had put it too close to the small heater. The other boy was defending him, and the man, whose face was bright red, looked as if he was about to strike the woman. Someone else kicked the box away while they argued. B.B. looked in. There were six or eight puppies inside, mostly black, squirming.

“Dad, are they in the auction?” Bryce said.

“I can’t stand the smoke,” Rona said. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’ll freeze,” B.B. said. He reached out and touched the tips of her hair. She had on a red angora hat, pulled over her forehead, which made her look extremely pretty but also about ten years old. A child’s hat and no makeup. The tips of her hair were still wet from the bathwater. Touching her hair, he was sorry that he had walked out of the bathroom when she said that about her hands.

They got three seats together near the back.

“Dad, I can’t see,” Bryce said.

“The damn Andrews Sisters,” B.B. said. “I can’t get their spooky voices out of my head.”

Bryce got up. B.B. saw, for the first time, that the metal folding chair his son had been sitting in had “PAM LOVES DAVID FOREVER AND FOR ALL TIME” written on it with Magic Marker. He took off his scarf and folded it over the writing. He looked over his shoulder, sure that Bryce would be at the stand where they sold hot dogs and soft drinks. He wasn’t; he was still inspecting the puppies. One of the boys said something to him, and his son answered. B.B. got up immediately and went over to join them. Bryce was reaching into his pocket.

“What are you doing?” B.B. said.

“Picking up a puppy,” Bryce said. He said it as he lifted the animal. The dog turned and rooted its snout in Bryce’s armpit, its eyes closed. With his free hand, Bryce handed the boy some money.

“What are you doing?” B.B. said.

“Dime a feel,” the boy said. Then, in a different tone, he said, “Week or so, they start eating food.”

“I never heard of anything like that,” B.B. said. The loofah popped up in his mind, expanded. Their drunken incredulity. The time, as a boy, he had watched a neighbor drown a litter of kittens in a washtub. He must have been younger than Bryce when that happened. And the burial: B.B. and the neighbor’s son and another boy who was an exchange student had attended the funeral for the drowned kittens. The man’s wife came out of the house, with the mother cat in one arm, and reached in her pocket and took out little American flags on toothpicks and handed them to each of the boys and then went back in the house. Her husband had dug a hole and was shoveling dirt back in. First he had put the kittens in a shoebox coffin, which he placed carefully in the hole he had dug near an abelia bush. Then he shoveled the dirt back in. B.B. couldn’t remember the name of the man’s son now, or the Oriental exchange student’s name. The flags were what they used to give you in your sundae at the ice-cream parlor next to the bank.

“You can hold him through the auction for a quarter,” the boy said to Bryce.

“You have to give the dog back,” B.B. said to his son.

Bryce looked as if he was about to cry. If he insisted on having one of the dogs, B.B. had no idea what he would do. It was what Robin, his ex-wife, deserved, but she’d probably take the dog to the pound.

“Put it down,” he whispered, as quietly as he could. The room was so noisy now that he doubted that the teenage boy could hear him. He thought he had a good chance of Bryce’s leaving the puppy if there was no third party involved.

To his surprise, Bryce handed over the puppy, and the teenager lowered it into the box. A little girl about three or four had come to the rim of the box and was looking down.

“I bet you don’t have a dime, do you, cutie?” the boy said to the girl.

B.B. reached in his pocket and took out a dollar bill, folded it, and put it on the cement floor in front of where the boy crouched. He took Bryce’s hand, and they walked to their seats without looking back.

“It’s just a bunch of junk,” Rona said. “Can we leave if it doesn’t get interesting?”

They bought a lamp at the auction. It had a nice base, and as soon as they found another lampshade it would be just right for the bedside table. Now it had a cardboard shade on it, imprinted with a cracked, fading bouquet.

“What’s the matter with you?” Rona said. They were back in their bedroom.

“Actually,” B.B. said, holding on to the window ledge, “I feel very out of control.”

“What does that mean?”

She put From Julia Child’s Kitchen on the night table, picked up her comb, and grabbed a clump of her hair. She combed through the snaggled ends, slowly.

“Do you think he has a good time here?” he said.

“Sure. He asked to come, didn’t he? You could look at his face and see that he enjoyed the auction.”

“Maybe he just does what he’s told.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Come over here.”

He sat on the bed. He had stripped down to his undershorts, and there were goose bumps all over his body. A bird was making a noise outside, screaming as if it were being killed. It stopped abruptly. The goose bumps slowly went away. Whenever he turned up the thermostat he always knew he was going to be sorry along about 5 a.m., when it got too hot in the room, but he was too tired to get up and go turn it down. She said that was why they got headaches. He reached across her now for the Excedrin. He put the bottle back on top of the cookbook and gagged down two of them.

“What’s he doing?” he said to her. “I don’t hear him.”

“If you made him go to bed, the way other fathers do, you’d know he was in bed. Then you’d just have to wonder if he was reading under the covers with a flashlight or—”

“Don’t say it,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say that he might have taken more Godivas out of the box my mother sent me. I’ve eaten two. He’s eaten a whole row.”

“He left a mint and a cream in that row. I ate them,” B.B. said.

He got up and pulled on a thermal shirt. He looked out the window and saw tree branches blowing. The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted snow at the end of the week. He hoped it didn’t snow then; it would make it difficult taking Bryce back to Vermont. There were two miles of unplowed road leading to Robin’s house.

He went downstairs. The oval table Bryce sat at was where the dining room curved out. Window seats were built around it. When they rented the house, it was the one piece of furniture left in it that neither of them disliked, so they had kept it. Bryce was sitting in an oak chair, and his forehead was on his arm. In front of him was the coloring book and a box of crayons and a glass vase with different-colored felt-tip pens stuck in it, falling this way and that, the way a bunch of flowers would. There was a pile of white paper. The scissors. B.B. assumed, until he was within a few feet of him, that Bryce was asleep. Then Bryce lifted his head.

“What are you doing?” B.B. said.

“I took the dishes out of the dishwasher and it worked,” Bryce said. “I put them on the counter.”

“That was very nice of you. It looks like my craziness about the dishwasher has impressed every member of my family.”

“What was it that happened before?” Bryce said.

Bryce had circles under his eyes. B.B. had read once that that was a sign of kidney disease. If you bruised easily, leukemia. Or, of course, you could just take a wrong step and break a leg. The dishwasher had backed up, and all the filthy water had come pouring out in the morning when B.B. opened the door—dirtier water than the food-smeared dishes would account for.

“It was a mess,” B.B. said vaguely. “Is that a picture?”

It was part picture, part letter, B.B. realized when Bryce clamped his hands over his printing in the middle.

“You don’t have to show me.”

“How come?” Bryce said.

“I don’t read other people’s mail.”

“You did in Burlington,” Bryce said.

“Bryce—that was when your mother cut out on us. That was a letter for her sister. She’d set it up with her to come stay with us, but her sister’s as much a space cadet as Robin. Your mother was gone two days. The police were looking for her. What was I supposed to do when I found the letter?”

Robin’s letter to her sister said that she did not love B.B. Also, that she did not love Bryce, because he looked like his father. The way she expressed it was: “Let spitting images spit together.” She had gone off with the cook at the natural-food restaurant. The note to her sister—whom she had apparently called as well—was written on the back of one of the restaurant’s flyers, announcing the menu for the week the cook ran away. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he had stood in the spare bedroom—whatever had made him go in there?—and read the names of desserts: “Tofu-Peach Whip!” “Granola Raspberry Pie!” “Macadamia Bars!”

“It’s make-believe anyway,” his son said, and wadded up the piece of paper. B.B. saw a big sunflower turn in on itself. A fir tree go under.

“Oh,” he said, reaching out impulsively. He smoothed out the paper, making it as flat as he could. The ripply tree sprang up almost straight. Crinkled birds flew through the sky. B.B. read:When I’m B.B.’s age I can be with you allways.We can live in a house like the Vt. house only not in Vt. no sno.We can get married and have a dog.

“Who is this to?” B.B. said, frowning at the piece of paper.

“Maddy,” Bryce said.

B.B. was conscious, for the first time, how cold the floorboards were underneath his feet. The air was cold, too. Last winter he had weather-stripped the windows, and this winter he hadn’t. Now he put a finger against a pane of glass in the dining-room window. It could have been an ice cube, his finger numbed so quickly.

“Maddy is your stepsister,” B.B. said. “You’re never going to be able to marry Maddy.”

His son stared at him.

“You understand?” B.B. said.

Bryce pushed his chair back. “Maddy’s not ever going to have her hair cut again,” he said. He was crying. “She’s going to be Madeline and I’m going to live with only her and have a hundred dogs.”

B.B. reached out to dry his son’s tears, or at least to touch them, but Bryce sprang up. She was wrong: Robin was so wrong. Bryce was the image of her, not him—the image of Robin saying, “Leave me alone.”

He went upstairs. Rather, he went to the stairs and started to climb, thinking of Rona lying in bed in the bedroom, and somewhere not halfway to the top, adrenaline surged through his body. Things began to go out of focus, then to pulsate. He reached for the railing just in time to steady himself. In a few seconds the first awful feeling passed, and he continued to climb, pretending, as he had all his life, that this rush was the same as desire.

Moving Water

My brother’s wife, Corky, is in the wicker chair in my bedroom tweezing her eyebrows, my magnifying mirror an inch from the tip of her nose. When I first met Corky, she was a student at Hunter; she wore long Indian dresses and high heels and had long hair. Now she wears running shoes and baggy slacks, has a sort of bowl haircut, and goes by her nickname instead of Charlotte. Plucking her eyebrows and being pregnant are two of her new self-improvement plans, along with taking driving lessons. She has come into the city from Morristown to spend the weekend, while Archie—new husband, my brother—is away on business. She is sitting by the telephone, waiting for her call to the obstetrician to be returned. Archie, on the phone last night, insisted that Corky check out whether it was all right for her to continue with her aerobic dance classes. Her end of the conversation was a long protest about his trying to make her into a neurotic now that she was pregnant. She gave me the phone and asked me to reason with him, but I stayed out of it. He and I discussed the progress of the wisteria. The wisteria in the back garden has leafed out and shot up four stories to my roof, where it cascades over the low brick railing and has worked its way through the skylight. In the morning, I find crumpled leaves and small purple flowers scattered over my sheet.

I’m stretched out on the bed, printing a letter to my grandmother. My grandmother can’t read my writing, but she is insulted when I type. She calls my typed letters “business letters.” I have a piece of lined paper underneath my writing paper so that I will remember to print large enough. As my letters go on, they tend to look as if they’d been put through a funnel. I reread my last sentence: “AS SOON AS THE WISTERIA GROWS, THOUSANDS OF TINY ANTS CLIMB UP AND COME IN THROUGH THE SCREENS.” It seems not just distressing but alarming, put in such large, blocky letters.

The phone rings, and Corky pounces on it.

“I feel so silly asking this, but my husband . . . Oh, the nurse . . . But I don’t have any bleeding! . . . Is this because you think I’m old?”

I ink out my last line and print instead, “ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT A HUGE WISTERIA VINE IS THRIVING RIGHT HERE IN NEW YORK CITY?”

I go into the living room. The view out of the tall windows is of the projects the next street over. Below me, in the back, are gardens, with high walls dividing them. Next door, two actors stand at opposite ends of their garden, each reading aloud from an identical book.

“ ‘What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff . . . ’ ”

“Again!” the actor from the far end of the garden hollers.

“ ‘What if it tempt you . . . ’ ”

“Oh, yeah. ‘It waves me still. Go on, I’ll follow thee.’ ”

As I’m watching, trying to block out Corky’s mounting hysteria, I see a kid of about ten, who has hauled himself up so that he can see over the fence of the adjacent garden. He throws something—a stone or a bottle cap—and screams, “Get back where you belong, faggots!,” drops to the ground, and runs toward his back door. Then I hear the ice-cream truck come down the street, playing its carrousel music. As my grandmother recently wrote me (with a fountain pen, flawlessly executing the Palmer method), “Sandy darling, everyone in New York’s always worked up.”

“All right, I’ll do it your way,” Corky is saying, as I go back to the bedroom and sit on the bed. She sounds like some brave actress in a nineteen-forties movie. This notion is reinforced by her bottom lip, quivering.

Two o’clock in the morning, and Corky and I are the last people in the restaurant except for Wyatt, my longtime friend. He’s just shaken some vegetables around in a pan and brought them to the table, along with a bottle of pepper vodka. A truck rattles by. Corky and I share the last slice of lemon meringue pie. Wyatt’s key ring is on the table: four keys to the restaurant, so he can set the alarms before he leaves.

“This place is pretty crazy,” he says, picking up a snow pea. “I thought that nothing could be worse than teaching fifth-grade grammar. But knowing all the rhymes on the jukebox is probably worse than teaching grammar.” He takes a joint out of his shirt pocket. “You know what happened tonight? My father’s accountant came in here with a guy. They had on T-shirts with swirls of pink and blue and green—it would have been good protective coloration in a basket of Easter eggs. The accountant almost died when he saw me. Then, Tuesday night, my old Hackensack heartthrob, Dorie Vesco, came in. I saw her sitting at the bar. She was all tied up. She had on one of those blouses that lace up the front and those shoes with strings that you wrap around your ankles. The guy she was with was a real jerk. Dorie Vesco and I recognized each other at the same instant, and when I hugged her the guy said, ‘This some kind of a setup?’ ” He laughs. “Wyatt and the cat,” he says, rubbing his foot over an orange cat that has just darted under the table. “She’s been around here longer’n me. Longer than anybody. Cat can’t set alarms, Wyatt can.”

We are in what used to be Jason’s favorite restaurant. I used to live with Jason; now we’re apart. After Wyatt took a job as a waiter here, though, Jason stopped coming. “Honey, it’s just too odd,” Jason said to me one night. “I don’t feel comfortable being waited on by the same person I always call when I have a question about the correct use of apostrophes.”

When we go out, Wyatt hands Corky the keys to the car. I open the back door, muttering about what a bad idea this is, because she has only had three driving lessons so far. She no more than pulls away from the curb than a cop car comes up alongside us and stops for the red light. I catch one cop’s eye and look away. Our car is angled strangely through two lanes. No cars are in back of us or around us. Next, one of the cops catches Corky’s eye. “You know what?” he calls over. “If you were a red Toyota with six guys inside, we’d have found what we’re looking for.” Then the cop in the driver’s seat leans forward and hollers, “Now he’ll tell you that if you twinkled you’d be the North Star, and we could follow you so we don’t get lost.”

The light changes and the cop car takes off, no siren, at about sixty miles an hour.

“Still nothing behind us,” Wyatt says, patting Corky’s leg. “First rule of driving: Many other dangerous people are driving at the same time you are, and you must drive defensively.”

“Did you think you’d marry Jason?” Corky says.

I never lived in a dorm when I was in college, but Corky did. Lights-out is still a signal to her to start talking.

“We almost got married,” I say. “I told you about that. The summer he bought the house in Garrison. We were as stupid as everybody else who’s breaking up. We kept finding something to do that interested us, so we could pretend that we were interested in each other.”

“What about you and Wyatt?”

“I’ve always thought that he loved somebody else. We had quite a talk about that years ago, and he said I was wrong. Then again, he never mentioned Dorie Vesco until tonight.”

“Archie told me a week before our wedding that he’d been engaged twice before.” She lights a cigarette. “Which was the one who flushed his credit card down the toilet?”

“Sally.”

“And Sondra’s the one who swallowed the ring?”

“A citrine with diamonds. Our grandmother’s. When Archie took her to the emergency room and she filled out the form, she said that she’d swallowed a bone.”

“She had to be nuts not to level with the people in the emergency room,” Corky says.

I roll over to see Corky’s face in the half-dark. She has unrolled the futon sofa into a mat on the bedroom floor, where she will sleep tonight.

“You know the rest of that story, don’t you?” I say. “The next day, he got a book about training puppies. He took it home and showed her the part where they say not to worry if your dog swallows a rock unless it chokes. A joke, but when they went to couples therapy she kept bringing up the dog book.”

Looking back, I can see how Jason liked to manipulate me. He relied on being a Southern boy when he wanted something. He talked about the house he wanted to buy as our opportunity to “live life on the plantation.” Even before we went to look at the property in Garrison, he was planning the afternoon croquet games we were going to play there; we’d play croquet and drink mint juleps, he announced. When Jason really wanted something, he began by making it into some kind of fantasy—the more exaggerated and ridiculous the better. He said that made it easier to cope with whatever problems came up later. We had lived together in the city for more than a year, and he was restless and wanted a place in the country. So he bought the big yellow house up the Hudson in Garrison and he took a leave of absence from his job and spent a month that autumn painting it white. I glazed windows and helped him sand the floors, and by the time the house started to shape up I loved it more than Jason did. In the mornings, I had coffee and watched the sparrows and the squirrel fighting over the birdseed in the hanging feeder outside the kitchen. I began to wait, in the late afternoon, for the sky to get pale and the sun to set. Jason took to sleeping late and reading magazines and watching the evening news. When he went back to the law firm where he worked in New York, I stayed on. Wyatt visited. Jason called and said that he couldn’t come up for a couple of weekends because he had so much paperwork. The next weekend, Corky and my brother drove up, and just before they left she took me by the arm in the driveway and walked me around to the back of their car. “I’d say that if you want to keep Jason you ought to get back to the city,” she said. But by then I wanted to believe what Jason said he believed when he bought the house: that New York City was a battle, that it was important to escape to a place where you didn’t always have to be on guard, that it was important to remember that it was a green world. Late in November, when I did leave the house at last and took the train back to New York, I walked into our apartment and felt like a stranger. He was still at the office. I wandered around, a little surprised that my things were still there—a pair of my sandals under the chair in the bedroom where I always kicked them. Walking around the bedroom verified what I hadn’t been able to admit in Garrison: that it really was over between us. Seeing my things there didn’t make me feel at home; it made me realize that it had always been Jason’s apartment. He had hung up the Audubon prints his parents had given us for Christmas; I’d never liked them—they were like prints on the walls of some country inn—and here they were, out in plain view. They were on the north wall, which he had always insisted be left empty because pictures would spoil the beauty of the bricks. When Jason came home from work, we made drinks and went up to the roof and talked. It was clear that we wouldn’t stay together, but he seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion. When I walked over to where he stood by the railing, it surprised me to see that he had tears in his eyes.

“Why be upset?” I said. “It’s not your fault. We both feel the same way.”

“When are you going to stop taking everything so casually?” he said. “As if you didn’t matter. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, and you made a really bad choice about me, way back. I feel guilty that I lived with you and let you assume that I loved you.”

“You did love me,” I said.

“Honey, I’m telling you the truth,” he said sadly. “Don’t forget what good Southern manners I have. You used to make fun of that. I wanted to love you. I acted as if I loved you.”

When I left, I walked to the restaurant and sat at the bar, waiting for Wyatt to get off work. Jason didn’t love me the time he said that on Saturday nights he never wanted to go out but only wanted to listen to Keith Jarrett’s “The Mourning of a Star” and make love? Not when I read him Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot and he laughed until he had to cover his face and then wipe tears away with the palms of his hands? Not at Thanksgiving, when we were doing the dishes and he kept putting his arm around my waist and raising my soapy hand out of the water to waltz me out of the kitchen?

I saw Jason one more time after that night—when I went there on a Sunday afternoon in February, after I’d moved. I wanted us to be friends. I climbed to the fourth floor, certain, for the millionth time, that the ancient stairs were going to cave in. I sat in one of the canvas director’s chairs and let him pour me a cup of coffee from the Melitta coffeepot. It was my pot, and I’d forgotten to pack it. Jason didn’t offer to give it back. He told me about the Garrison house; he had put it up for sale, and a television producer and his wife had made an offer. They were negotiating. As we talked, my eye caught the bright-pink spine of the Firbank book on the topmost bookshelf across the room. Maybe he was harboring secret grudges. Maybe there were things I had taken home with me inadvertently. He got all the Keith Jarrett records. My down vest. The Firbank. Before I moved, he had helped me by separating my books and records from his and putting mine in cartons. I didn’t unpack for weeks, so it took a while to realize how many were missing. If he’d done it deliberately, one other thing he did threw me off: at the bottom of one of the cartons of books he had put his gray corduroy shirt, which I had always pulled over my nightgown on cold winter mornings.

This weekend Corky told me, in the bedroom, that since Jason and I broke up I had begun to shut myself off from everyone—she was trying to be supportive, she said, and I wouldn’t even talk about my anger or my sadness. I told her that I thought about it a lot—that when people weren’t in love they had a lot of time to think; that’s why there weren’t very many surprises, or the surprises didn’t have the same intensity they had when you were in love. What happened when I’d been waiting for her to come to my apartment the day before, for example: A bee flew into the bedroom, bumped against the skylight, buzzing. I dismissed my other options right away: hiding under the blanket all day; rolling the Times into a club and trying to kill it. I decided to do nothing, and when it flew lower, out of the skylight, it did the last thing I would have predicted—it flew in a straight line to the inch-wide crack in the screen, almost filled in by the lush vines that covered the building, and disappeared through the leaves. I waited for it to be perverse and fly back in, but it didn’t. Then I got up and tore the leaves away from the screen and put masking tape over the crack where the screen had separated from the frame.

It’s logical that everyone wants to be in love. Then, for a while, life isn’t taken up with the tedium of thinking everything through, talking things through. It’s nice to be able to notice small objects or small moments, to point them out and to have someone eager to pretend that there’s more to them than it seems. Jason was very good at that—at convincing me that somehow, because we were together, what we saw took on an importance beyond itself. The last autumn we were together, we drove over to Cold Spring, late one afternoon. We drove to the far side of the railroad tracks, past the gazebo, to the edge of the paved area where cars park at the edge of the Hudson. How could he have tried to convince me, later, that he didn’t love me? We were young lovers then, getting out of the car and throwing stale bread to the black ducks on the river. We sat on a bench, looking at the high cliffs across the water and tightening our hold on each other’s waist as we imagined, I suppose, the voyage we’d have to take to get there, and the climb to the top. Or maybe we squeezed each other tighter because we were safe where we were: no boat, no possibility we’d swim, no reason to make such an effort anyway. It was October, and the wind was so strong that it nearly knocked us off the bench; tears came to my eyes long before Jason whispered to me to look: such strong wind—it made it seem that the water was being blown downstream, instead of flowing.

Coney Island

Drew is sitting at the kitchen table in his friend Chester’s apartment in Arlington. It’s a bright day, and the sun shining through the kitchen curtains, patterned with chickens, gives the chickens an advantage they don’t have in real life; backlit, they’re luminous. Beautiful.

Drew has been at Chester’s for a couple of hours. The light is sharp now, in late afternoon. Between them, on the table, the bottle of Jack Daniel’s is half empty. Chester pours another half inch into his glass, wipes the bottle neck with his thumb, licks it. He twirls the cap back on the bottle, like people who replace the cork after they’ve poured a glass of wine. Chester likes wine; his wife, Holly, converted him, but he knows better than to offer wine to Drew. Holly is in the hospital now, and will be there overnight; his tests for infertility were negative, and now the doctors are doing some kind of minor exploratory surgery on her. Maybe he would have gotten loaded today even if Drew hadn’t shown up.

Drew is tapping the salt and pepper shakers together. The shakers are in the shape of penguins. What a sense of humor his friends Ches and Holly have! One penguin looks like a penguin, and the other has on a vest and top hat. Probably they were manufactured as jokes.

Chester’s radio needs new batteries. He holds it in his right hand and shakes it with the motion he’d use to shake a cocktail shaker. Earlier, he thought about shaking up some Manhattans, but Drew said he preferred his bourbon straight.

Today, Drew drove across the mountains from Waynesboro to come to his nephew’s christening in Arlington. The party afterward was at his mother’s. Before the party he had pruned some bushes, fixed the basement door so it wouldn’t stick. Afterward, when everyone had gone and his mother was in the bathroom, he used the phone and called his old girlfriend, Charlotte. That was unexpected, even to Drew. The month before, Charlotte married a man who managed a trendy hardware store in some mall outside of Arlington. Drew’s mother cut the wedding announcement out of the paper and sent it to him at work, with “Personal” written on the envelope. Now when he has this affair with Charlotte, his secretary will know. What else would a secretary think about a boss getting a letter marked “Personal”?

It’s less than an hour until Drew will go to meet Charlotte for a drink. Charlotte Coole, now Charlotte Raybill. Charlotte Coole Raybill, for all Drew knows. Chester has agreed to go along, so that if they’re seen people may at least assume it’s just some friends having a drink for old times’ sake. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. A cousin of Drew’s, Howard, had a long affair with a married woman when he lived in New York. It lasted four years. They always met in Grand Central. For years, people hurried around them. Children were tugged past. Religious fanatics held out pamphlets. It was so likely that they’d see somebody one of them knew that of course they never did, and, to their knowledge, nobody ever saw them. They drank at Windows on the World. Who would ever find them there? Howard had a way of telling the story for laughs—the two of them holding each other beside the gate of the Mount Kisco local, kissing until their mouths felt burned, and then, downtown, sitting beside the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty. When Drew was a little boy, he went to New York with his family. They climbed up the statue, and for years he still believed what his father told him—that he’d climbed into the thumb. Howard’s lover divorced her husband but married someone else. Howard got bitter and took it out on everybody. Once, he told Drew and Chester that they were nowhere, that they’d never examined anything for a moment in their lives. What did Howard know, Drew thinks. Howard used to look out high windows and he ended up in another skyscraper, in a shrink’s office, with the blinds closed.

Drew says, “Charlotte’s elbows were pointy, like a hard lemon. I used to hold on to her elbows when I made love to her. What a thing to be sitting here remembering.”

“Drew, she’s meeting you for a drink,” Chester says sadly. “She’s not going to leave her husband.”

Chester taps the radio lightly on the table, the way he’d tap a cigarette out of a pack. Drew and Chester don’t smoke. They haven’t smoked since college. Drew met Charlotte and fell in love with her when he was a sophomore in college. “She’s a kid,” Howard had said to him back then, in one of those late-night fraternity-house rap sessions. Howard always took a fatherly tone, although he was only two years ahead of them. “Let’s call Howard,” Drew says now. “Ask him what he thinks about Holly.” Howard is a surgeon in Seattle. They track him down sometimes at the hospital, or through his answering service, late at night. A couple of times, drunk, they disguised their voices and gave garbled panicky accounts of what they thought Howard would recognize as a heart attack or a ruptured appendix.

“I met the doctor Holly’s been going to,” Chester says. He points at the kitchen ceiling. “If that God Almighty and her God Almighty gynecologist think there’s no reason why she can’t have a baby, I’m just going to wait this one out.”

“I just thought we might call him,” Drew says. He takes off his shoes.

“No point calling about this,” Chester says. Chester pours himself another drink. He rubs his hair back off his forehead, and that feels good. He does it again, then once again.

“Call the hospital and see how she made out,” Drew says.

“I’m her husband and you think I wasn’t there? I saw her. They wheeled her out and she said that she didn’t care if she never had a kid—that she couldn’t stand to feel like ice. That was the, you know . . . anesthetic. I held her feet in my hands for an hour. She was asleep and the nurse told me to go home. In the morning, when Dr. High and Mighty shows up, I guess we’ll know something. How come you’re so full of advice?”

“I didn’t give any advice. I said to call her,” Drew says.

Drew holds the bottle against his forehead for a second, then puts it back on the table. “I’m hungry,” he says. “I ought to do everything before I see Charlotte, shouldn’t I? Eat so there’ll be time to talk. Drink and get sober. Do it all beforehand.”

“How come you decided to call Charlotte today?” Chester says.

“My nephew—”

“I mean why call Charlotte? Why call her?”

This time, Drew fiddles with the radio, and a station comes in, faintly. They both listen, surprised. It’s still only October, and the man is talking about the number of shopping days left until Christmas. Drew moves the dial and loses the station. He can’t get it back. He shoves the radio across the table. A penguin tips over. It rests there, with its pointed face on the radio.

“I’ll have another drink and stand her up,” Drew says.

“Oh, I can do it for you,” Chester says, and sets the penguin upright.

“Aren’t you a million laughs,” Drew says. “Charlotte—not the penguin. Charlotte, Charlotte—Charlotte who isn’t going to leave her husband. Does that get her name into the conversation enough?”

“I don’t want to go with you,” Chester says. “I don’t see the point of it.” He rubs his hands across his forehead again. He cups one hand over his eyes and doesn’t say anything else.

Drew puts his hand over his glass. The gesture of a person refusing a refill, but no one’s offering. He looks at his hands.

Chester reaches in his shirt pocket. If the missing laundry receipt isn’t there or in his wallet, where is it? It has to be somewhere, in some pocket. He puts his index finger in the neck of the bottle. He wiggles it. There is a little pile of salt where the penguin tipped over. Chester pushes the salt into a line, pretends to be holding a straw in his fingers, touches the imaginary straw to the inch of salt, closes off one nostril, inhales with the other as he moves the straw up the line. He smiles more widely.

“Be glad you don’t have that problem,” Drew says.

“I am,” Chester says. “I tell you, I’m glad I don’t even remember being gassed when I had my tonsils out when I was a kid. Holly was so cold and sleepy. But not nice sleep—more like she’d been hit.”

“She’s O.K.,” Drew says.

“How do you know?” Chester says. Then he’s surprised by how harsh his voice sounds. He smiles. “Sneaking around to see her, the way you make arrangements to see Charlotte?” he says.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Drew says. “What a sick thing to say.”

“I was kidding.”

“And no matter what I said now, I couldn’t win, could I? If I made out like I’d be crazy to be interested in Holly, you’d be insulted, right?”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Chester says. “You go see Charlotte. I’ll sit here and have a drink. What do you want me for?”

“I told her you were coming,” Drew says. He takes a sip of his drink. “I was thinking about that time we went to Coney Island,” he says.

“You told me,” Chester says. “You mean years ago, right?”

“I told you about shooting the rifle?”

“Coney Island,” Chester sighs. “Have some dogs at Nathan’s, ride that Cyclone or whatever it’s called, pop a few shots and win your girl a prize . . .”

“I told you?”

“Go ahead and tell me,” Chester says.

Chester pours two drinks. After Drew’s drink is poured, Drew puts his hand over the glass again.

“You’ve got about five minutes to tell me, by the way, unless you’re really going to stand her up,” Chester says.

“Maybe she’ll stand me up.”

“She won’t stand you up.”

“O.K.,” Drew says. “Charlotte and I went to Coney Island. Got on those rides that tilt you every which way, and what do you call that thing with the glass sides that goes up the pole so you can look out—”

“I’ve never been to Coney Island,” Chester says.

“I was showing her my style,” Drew says. “The best part was later. This guy in the shooting gallery clips the cardboard card with the star on it to the string, sends it down to the end of the line, and I start blasting. Did it three or four times, and there was always some tiny part of the blue left. The pinpoint of the tip of one triangle. The middle of the target was this blue star. I was such a great shot that I was trying to win by shooting out the star, and the guy finally said to me, “Man, you’re trying to blast that star away. What you do is shoot around it, and the star falls out.” Drew looks at Chester through the circle of his thumb and first finger, drops his hand to the table. “What you’re supposed to do is go around it, like slipping a knife around a cake pan to get the cake out.” Drew takes a sip of his drink. He says, “My father never taught me anything.”

Chester gets up, drinks the last of his bourbon, puts the glass in the sink. He looks around his kitchen as if it were unfamiliar. At one time, it was. Holly had it painted pastel green while he was at work. Now it’s pearl-colored. Her skin was the color of the kitchen walls when they wheeled her out of the recovery room. He put his hands on her feet, for some reason, before she was even able to speak and tell him that she was cold. Sometimes in the winter when they’re in bed, he reaches down and gets her feet and tucks them under his legs. Drew met Holly before he did, fifteen years ago. He went out with her once, and he didn’t even kiss her. Now, when he comes to dinner every month or so, he kisses her forehead when he comes and when he goes. “I’m persuading her,” Drew sometimes says—or something like that—when he leaves. “Fifteen years, and I’m still giving her every opportunity.” Holly always blushes. She likes Drew. She thinks that he drinks too much but that nobody’s perfect. Holly’s way of thinking about things has started to creep into Chester’s speech. A minute ago, wasn’t he talking about God Almighty? Holly’s the one who seriously believes in God Almighty.

Drew stands beside Chester at the kitchen sink and splashes water on his face. He’s tan and he looks good. Hair a little shaggy. There’s some white in his sideburns. He wipes his face on the dish towel and swirls water in his mouth, spits it out. He pours a glass of water and drinks a few sips. The five minutes were up ten minutes ago. They go out to the hall and get the keys off the table. They’re on a Jaguar key chain. Chester’s car is a ’68 Pontiac.

“Who’s driving the Indian?” Chester says.

Drew reaches for the keys. In the elevator, he sees coronas around the lighted buttons with the floor numbers on them and tosses the keys back to Chester. Chester almost misses them because his mind is elsewhere. He has to remember to wash the glasses; he promised Holly he’d fix the leaking faucet. He’ll have one drink at the bar, say hello to Charlotte, and do some work around the apartment later. The elevator is going frustratingly slow. If they can have a child and if it’s a girl, Holly wants to name it for a flower: Rose or Lily or Margy—is that what she thought up? Short for Marigold.

Drew is thinking about what he can say to Charlotte. They were together for two years. There was a world between them. How do people make small talk when they’ve shared a world? And if you say something real, it always seems too sudden. There are a lot of things he’d like to know, questions he could probably shoot out like gunfire. She really loved him, and she married somebody else? She got tired of trying to convince him that she loved him? She read in some magazine that people who’ve had an unhappy childhood, the way he did, stay screwed up? He remembers his father: instead of walking him through museums and taking trips to see statues and to eat in dim taverns with pewter plates, places that had been standing since the nineteenth century, he could have done something practical, like teach him to shoot. Just put your arms outside the kid’s, move his fingers where they should go, line up the rifle and show him how to sight, tell him how to keep the gun steady, if that isn’t already obvious.

Drew slides into the car, bangs his knee on the side of the door as he pulls it shut. In another second, Chester has opened the driver’s door and gotten in. But he doesn’t start the car.

“You know, friendship’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?” Chester says, clamping his hand on Drew’s shoulder.

Drew looks over at him, and Chester looks sad. Drew wonders if Chester is worried about Holly. Or is he just drunk? But that has to wait for a second. What Drew has just realized is that what felt like panic all day is really excitement. A drink with Charlotte—after all this time, he’s seeing her again. What he wants to say to Chester is so difficult that he can’t bring himself to look him in the eye.

“Ches,” Drew says, looking through the windshield, rubbing his hand over his mouth, then resting it on his chin. “Ches—have you ever been in love?”

Television

Billy called early in the week to tell me he’d found out that Friday was Atley’s birthday. Atley had been Billy’s lawyer first, and then Billy recommended him to me. He became my lawyer when I called Billy after my car fell into a hole in the car wash. Atley gave me a free five minutes in his office so that I could understand that small claims court would be best. Billy had the idea that we should take Atley to lunch on his birthday. I said to him, “What are we going to do with Atley at lunch?” and he said that we’d think of something. I was all for getting some out-of-work ballerina to run into the restaurant with Mylar balloons, but Billy said no, we’d just think of something. He picked the restaurant, and when Friday came we were still thinking when the three of us met there and sat down, and because we were all a little uptight the first thing we thought of, of course, was having some drinks. Then Atley got to telling the story about his cousin who’d won a goldfish in a brandy snifter; he got so attached to the fish that he went out and got it an aquarium, but then he decided that the fish didn’t look happy in the aquarium. Atley told his cousin that the brandy glass had magnified the fish and that’s what made it look happy, but the cousin wouldn’t believe it, so the cousin had a couple of drinks that night and decided to lower the brandy glass into the aquarium. He dug around in the pebbles and then piled them up around the base of the glass to anchor it, and the fish eventually started swimming around and around outside the top of the submerged glass in the same contented way, Atley said, that people in a hot tub sit there and hold their hands next to where the jets of water rush in.

The waiter came and told us the specials, and Billy and I both started smiling and looking away, because we knew that it was Atley’s birthday and we were going to have to do something pretty soon. If we’d known the fish story beforehand, we could have gotten a fish as a gag present. The waiter probably thought we were laughing at him and hated us for it; he had to stand there and say “Côtelette Plus Ça Change” or whatever the specialty was, when actually he wanted to be John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He had the pelvis for it.

Billy said, when he was eating his shrimp, “My parents had a New Year’s Eve party the last time I visited them, and some woman got ripped and took my father’s shoe and sock off and painted his toenails.” At this point I cracked up, and the waiter, who was removing my plate, looked at me as if I was dispensable. “That’s not it, that’s not the punch line!” Billy said. Atley held his hand up in cop-stopping-traffic style, and Billy made a fist and hit it. Then he said, “The punch line is, a week later my father was reading the paper at breakfast and my mother said, ‘What if I get some nail-polish remover and fix your toes?’ and my father said, ‘Don’t do it.’ She was scared to do it!”

“I had such a happy childhood,” I said. “We always rented a beach house during the summer, and my mother and father had one of each of our baby shoes bronzed—my sister’s and mine—and my parents danced in the living room a lot. My father said the only way he’d have a TV was if he could think of it as a giant radio, so when they finally bought one he’d be watching and my mother would come into the room and he’d get up and take her in his arms and start humming and dancing. They’d dance while Kate Smith talked or whatever, or while Gale Storm made her My Little Margie noise.”

Atley squinted and leaned against the table. “Come on, come on, come on—what do two people who have money do all day?” he whispered. That was when Billy kissed me, which made it look as if what we did was make love all day, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe it was part of some act Billy was putting on because he’d already figured out what to do about the birthday. The waiter was opening a bottle of champagne, which I guess Billy had ordered. I knew very few facts about Billy’s ex. One was that she really liked champagne. Another was that she had been in Alateen. Her father had been a big drunk. He’d thrown her mother out a window once. She’d gone back to him but not until she’d taken him to court.

“I’ll tell you something,” Atley said. “I shocked the hell out of one of our summer interns. I took him aside in the office and I told him, ‘You know what lawyers are? Barnacles on a log. The legal system is like one big, heavy log floating downstream, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Remember every time one of those judges lifts a gavel that it’s just a log with a handle.’ ”

The cork took off right across the restaurant. We all looked. It landed near the pastry cart. The waiter said, “It flew through my fingers,” and looked at his hand, as surprised as if he’d been casually counting his fingers and found that he had seven of them. We were all sorry for the waiter because he was so shocked. He stared at his hand so long that we looked away. Billy kissed me again. I thought it might be a gesture to break the silence.

The waiter poured champagne into Atley’s glass first; he did it quickly and his hand was shaking so much that the foam started to rise fast. Atley held up his hand to indicate that he should stop pouring. Billy punched Atley’s hand again.

“You son of a gun,” Billy said. “Do you think we don’t know it’s your birthday? Did you think we didn’t know that?”

Atley turned a little red. “How did you know that?” he said.

Billy raised his glass and we all raised ours and clinked them, above the pepper mill.

Atley was quite red.

“Son of a gun,” Billy said. I smiled, too. The waiter looked and saw that we had drained our glasses, and looked surprised again. He quickly came back to pour champagne, but Billy had beaten him to it. In a few minutes, the waiter came back and put three brandy snifters with a little ripple of brandy in them on the table. We must have looked perplexed, and the waiter certainly did. “From the gentleman across the room,” the waiter said. We turned around. Billy and I didn’t recognize anybody, but some man was grinning like mad. He lifted his lobster off his plate and pointed it at Atley. Atley smiled and mouthed, “Thank you.”

“One of the best cytologists in the world,” Atley said. “A client.”

When I looked away, the man was still holding his lobster and moving it so that it looked as if it were swimming through air.

“The gentleman told me to bring the brandy now,” the waiter said, and went away.

“Do you think it would be crude to tell him we’re going to leave him a big tip?” Billy said.

“Are we?” I said.

“Oh, I’ll leave the tip. I’ll leave the tip,” Atley said.

The waiter, who seemed always to be around our table, heard the word “tip” and looked surprised again. Billy picked up on this and smiled at him. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said.

It was surprising how fast we ate, though, and in a little while, since none of us wanted coffee, the waiter was back with the bill. It was in one of those folders—a leather book, with the restaurant’s initials embossed on the front. It reminded me of my Aunt Jean’s trivet collection, and I said so. Aunt Jean knew somebody who would cast trivets for her, to her specifications. She had an initialed trivet. She had a Rolls-Royce trivet—those classy intertwined Rs. This had us laughing. I was the only one who hadn’t touched the brandy. When Billy put his credit card in a slot in the book, Atley said, “Thank you.” I did too, and Billy put his hand over mine and kissed me again. He’d kissed me so many times that by now I was a little embarrassed, so to cover up for that I touched my forehead to his after the kiss so that it would seem like a routine of ours to Atley. It was either that or say, “What are you doing?”

Atley wanted to have his chauffeur drop us, but out on the street Billy took my hand and said that we wanted to walk. “This nice weather’s not going to hold up,” he said. Atley and I realized at the same moment that two young girls were in the back of the limousine.

“Who are they?” Atley said to the chauffeur.

The chauffeur was holding the door open and we could see that the girls were sitting as far back in the seat as they could, like people backed up against a wall who are hoping not to be hurt.

“What could I do?” the chauffeur said. “They were lit. They hopped in. I was just trying to chase them out.”

“Lit?” Atley said.

“Tipsy,” the chauffeur said.

“Why don’t you proceed to get them out?” Atley said.

“Come on, girls,” the chauffeur said. “You get out, now. You heard what he said.”

One got out and the other one, who didn’t have on as many clothes, took longer and made eye contact with the chauffeur.

“There you go,” the chauffeur said, extending his elbow, but she ignored it and climbed out by herself. Both of them looked back over their shoulders as they walked away.

“Why do I put up with this?” Atley said to the chauffeur. His face was red again. I didn’t want Atley to be upset and his birthday lunch to be spoiled, so I pecked him on the cheek and smiled. It is certainly true that if women ran the country they would never send their sons to war. Atley hesitated a minute, kissed me back, then smiled. Billy kissed me, and for a second I was confused, thinking he might have intended to send me off with Atley. Then he and Atley shook hands and we both said, “Happy birthday,” and Atley bent over and got into the back of the limousine. When the chauffeur closed the door, you couldn’t see that it was Atley in there, because the glass was tinted. As the chauffeur was getting into the front seat, the back door opened and Atley leaned forward.

“I can tell you one thing. I was surprised that somebody remembered my birthday,” he said. “You know what I was just thinking apropos of your story about your mother and father dancing to the television? I was thinking that sometimes you go along in the same way so long that you forget how one little interlude of something different can change everything.” He was grinning at Billy. “She’s too young to remember those radio shows,” he said. “Life of Riley and things like that.” He looked at me. “When they wanted to let you know that time was passing, there’d be a few bars of music, and then they’d be talking about something else.” Atley’s foot, in a black sock and a shiny black oxford, was dangling out the door. The chauffeur pulled his door shut. Then Atley closed his door too, and the limo drove away. Before we had turned to leave, though, the car stopped and backed up to us again. Atley rolled down his window. He stuck his head out. “ ‘Oh, Mr. Atley,’ ” he said in falsetto, “ ‘wherever are you going?’ ” He whistled a few notes. Then, in a booming, gruff voice, he said, “ ‘Why, Atley, back at work after your surprise birthday lunch?’ ” He rolled up the window. The chauffeur drove away.

Billy thought this was nice weather? It was March in New York, and there hadn’t been any sun for three days. The wind was blowing so hard that an end of my scarf flew up over my face. Billy put his arm around my waist and we watched the limousine make it through a yellow light and swerve to avoid a car that had suddenly stopped to back into a parking space.

“Billy,” I said, “why did you keep kissing me all through lunch?”

“We’ve known each other quite a while,” he said, “and I realized today that I’d fallen in love with you.”

This surprised me so much that as well as moving away from him I also went back in my mind to the safety and security of childhood. “You make a trade,” my mother had said to me once. “You give up to get. I want a TV? Why, then, I let him make me dance every time I come into the room. I’ll bet you think women are always fine dancers and men always try to avoid dancing? Your father would go out dancing every night of the week if he could.” As Billy and I walked down the street, I suddenly thought how strange it was that we’d never gone dancing.

My mother had said all that to me in the living room, when Ricky was at his wit’s end with Lucy on television and my father was at work. I sympathized with her at once. I liked being with my mother and thinking about something serious that I hadn’t thought about before. But when I was alone—or maybe this only happened as I got older—puzzling things out held no fascination for me. The rug in the room where my mother and I talked was patterned with pink cabbage-size roses. Years later, I’d have nightmares that a huge trellis had collapsed and disappeared and I’d suddenly found the roses, two-dimensional, on the ground.

Lofty

Kate could think of nothing but how she had cheated when she and Philip lived in this house. She had put little daubs of glue on the back of peeling wallpaper and pushed it back into place; she had stuffed the big aqua urns at the back door with rags—they were deep enough to hold twenty pounds of earth—and then poured a foot of soil on top. The pansies, pounded deep into the urns by summer rain, had shot up and cascaded over the rims anyway.

The house belonged to Philip’s Great-Aunt Beatrice, and she had come in person every month for the rent check, but all Kate’s worrying about their tenancy had been for nothing. The woman rarely looked closely at anything; in fact, in winter she often kept her car running in the driveway while she made the call, and wouldn’t even come inside for coffee. In the summer she stayed a few minutes to cut roses or peonies to take back to the city. She was a tall old lady, who wore flowered dresses, and by the time she headed for her ancient Cadillac she herself often looked like a gigantic flower in motion, refracted through a kaleidoscope.

In retrospect, Kate realized that the house must have looked perfectly presentable. When she and Philip first moved in and were in love with each other, they were in love with the place, and when they were no longer in love the house seemed to sink in sympathy. The sagging front step made her sad; a shutter fell from the second story one night, frightening them into each other’s arms.

When the two of them decided to part, they agreed that it was silly not to stay on until the lease was up at the end of summer. Philip’s young daughter was visiting just then, and she was having a wonderful time. The house was three stories high—there was certainly room enough to avoid each other. He was being transferred to Germany by his firm in September. Kate planned to move to New York, and this way she could take her time looking for a place. Wadding newspaper to stuff into the urns for another summer, she had been shocked at how tightly she crushed it—as if by directing her energy into her hands she could fight back tears.

Today, ten years later, Kate was back at the house. Philip’s daughter, Monica, was eighteen now, and a friend of Monica’s was renting the house. Today was Monica’s engagement party. Kate sat in a lawn chair. The lawn was nicely mowed. The ugly urns were gone, and a fuchsia plant hung from the lamppost beside the back door. A fuzz of green spread over a part of the lawn plot that had been newly plowed for a garden. The big maple tree that encroached on the kitchen had grown huge; she wondered if any light could penetrate that room now.

She knew that the spike in the maple tree would still be there. It had been there, mysteriously in place, when they first moved in. She walked up to the tree and put her hand on it. It was rusted, but still the height to allow a person to get a foot up, so that he could pull himself up into the nearest overhead branches.

Before the party, Philip had sent Monica a note that Monica showed to Kate with a sneer. He said that he was not going to attend the celebration of a mistake; she was too young to marry, and he would have nothing to do with the event. Kate thought that his not being there had less to do with his daughter and more to do with Kate and him. Either he still loved her or else he hated her. She closed her hand around the spike in the tree.

“Climb up so I can look up your skirt,” her husband said.

And then he was surprised when she did.

Ignoring the finger she’d scraped on the bark pulling herself up, she stood on the first high branch and reached behind to tug her skirt free, laughing and letting the skirt drift away from her body. She went one branch higher, carefully, and leaned out to look down. She turned and leaned against a higher branch, facing him, and raised her skirt.

“O.K.,” he said, laughing, too. “Be careful.”

She realized that she had never looked down on him before—not out of a window, not in any situation she could think of. She was twelve or fifteen feet off the ground. She went one branch higher. She looked down again and saw him move closer to the tree, as quickly as a magnet. He was smaller.

“Birds used to peck birdseed from a seeded bell that dangled from there,” she said, pointing to the branch her husband could almost touch. “This tree used to be filled with birds in the morning. They were so loud that you could hear them over the bacon sputtering.”

“Come down,” he said.

She felt a little frightened when she saw how small his raised hand was. Her body felt light, and she held on tighter.

“Sweetheart,” he said.

A young man in a white jacket was coming toward her husband, carrying two drinks. “Whoa, up there!” he called. She smiled down. In a second, a little girl began to run toward the man. She was about two years old, and not steady on her feet where the lawn began to slope and the tree’s roots pushed out of the ground. The man quickly handed the drinks to her husband and turned to swoop up the child as she stumbled. Kate, braced for the child’s cry, exhaled when nothing happened.

“There used to be a tree house,” Kate said. “We hung paper lanterns from it when we had a party.”

“I know,” her husband said. He was still reaching up, a drink in each hand. The man standing with him frowned. He reclaimed his drink and began to edge away, talking to the little girl. Her husband put his drink on the grass.

“Up in the tree!” the little girl squealed. She turned to look over her shoulder.

“That’s right,” the man said. “Somebody’s up in the tree.”

The glass at her husband’s feet had tipped over.

“We didn’t,” Kate said. “I made it up.”

He said, “Shall I come up and get you?” He touched his hand to the spike. Or else she thought he did; she couldn’t lean far enough forward to see.

“You’re so nice to me,” she said.

He moved back and stretched up his arms.

She had never been daring when she was young, and she wanted to stand her ground now. It made her giddy to realize how odd a thought that was—the contradiction between “standing your ground” and being balanced in a tree. There could have been a tree house. And who else but she and Philip would have lived in such a place and not had lawn parties? She didn’t think Monica was wrong about getting married; her fiancé was charming and silly and energetic. Her own husband was very charming—demonstrative only in private, surprised by her pranks to such an extent that she often thought he subtly encouraged her to act up because he admired people who could do such things. He was modest. It wasn’t like him to say, “Climb up so I can look up your skirt.”

“I’ll fly,” she said.

He dropped his hands to his sides. “A walk in the woods,” he said.

At the back of the lawn, where the lawn tapered into the woods, the man and his daughter were crouched, looking at something in the grass. Kate could hear piano music coming from inside the house.

“A drive,” her husband said. “We’ll walk out on the celebration for a few minutes.”

She shook her head no. Then her ribs felt like a tourniquet, and she decided to start down before she was in more pain. She was embarrassed that there was nothing courageous about her careful, gingerly descent. She felt the sweat above her lip and noticed, for the first time, a streak of blood along the side of her hand—the cut on her finger that had now stopped bleeding. She put her finger to her lips, and the salty taste brought tears to her eyes. She put her feet on the ground and faced her husband, then made the dramatic gesture of raising her arms and fanning them open for a second, as wide as a trellis, before they closed around him.

One Day

Henry was twenty, and for almost fifteen years of his life he had understood that he didn’t like his older brother, Gerald. His father, Carl, didn’t care that Henry didn’t get along with Gerald, but his mother, who thought the boys would grow into affection for each other, now asked more often what was wrong. Whenever Henry admitted that he disliked Gerald, his mother said, “Life is too short not to love your brother.” On this particular visit, Henry had told her that he didn’t actually dislike Gerald—he was indifferent. “This is no time to be indifferent,” she had said. Gerald was in the process of getting divorced. He had been married to a woman named Cora. Probably the nicest thing Henry could remember about her was that she had once praised him excessively and convincingly for changing a tire. The most embarrassing thing happened the time he shared a canoe with her on a water ride at an amusement park; thrown against her as the canoe turned and tilted, he had twice reached out reflexively to steady himself and made the mistake of grabbing her breast instead of her arm.

Henry and Gerald had just arrived, separately, at their parents’ house in Wilton. Gerald was already stretched out on a chaise, with his shirt off, drinking a gin-and-tonic, getting a tan. After Henry had done a little work around the yard, he reverted, as always, to being childish: he was drinking Coke and putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

It was Carl’s birthday. Henry had given his father a pair of swimming trunks patterned with a mishmash of hibiscus, hummingbirds, and something that looked like brown bananas. His mother had bought his father more weights for his barbell. Earlier in the day, two boxes had been delivered from the store. After the delivery boy lowered them to the kitchen floor, he had shaken his hands and then examined his palms. “God help me,” he said.

“Henry, darling,” his mother, Verna, said now. She had come out of the house and stood in front of the picnic table, where he was assembling a puzzle that would be a pizza all the way when he finished. She put a mug of iced tea next to him on the table. There were no glasses in the house—only mugs. He had never asked why. When she said “Henry, darling,” it meant that she was announcing her presence in case he wanted to talk. He didn’t. He pushed two pieces together. An anchovy overlapped a piece of green pepper.

“Thank you for trimming the hedge,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

“I think that Gerald is more upset about the divorce than he lets on. A friend of Daddy’s called Gerald this morning to play golf, and he wouldn’t.”

Henry nodded. More to get away from Verna than to commiserate with his brother, he got up and walked across the lawn to where Gerald lay stretched out on the chaise, eyes closed. Gerald was only twenty-seven, but he looked older. There was a little roll of fat around the belt line of his khaki jeans. Henry knew that Gerald knew that he was standing there. Gerald didn’t open his eyes. An ant was running around the rim of Gerald’s gin-and-tonic. Henry brushed it in.

“Feel like going down to the driving range and hitting a couple of buckets?” Henry said.

“You know what I feel like?” Gerald said. “I feel like going to bed with somebody who’s beautiful and eighteen years old and who doesn’t ask a million questions.”

“You care if it’s a girl?” Henry said.

“Ha, ha,” Gerald said.

“What questions?” Henry said.

“About everything I ever did or thought before I got into bed with her, and what I’m going to act like and what I’m going to think the minute I stand up.”

Henry sat on the grass, pulled a blade, and chewed on the end. Then he tossed it away and walked down the sloping lawn to where his mother stood, shaking insecticide onto rose leaves.

“He’s pretty sad,” Henry said. “But he’s been thinking about things. He says he’s going to church on Sunday.”

“Church?” his mother said.

The sun shone through the green visor his mother was wearing. Her face was yellow.

Henry went back onto the porch to get out of the sun. Through the front screen he saw the newly cut grass, the level privet hedge that bordered the front lawn. In front of the walk, the street was empty. He tried to imagine Sally’s rusty beige Ford parked there.

No one in the family approved of Sally, the woman he loved. She had been his graphic-design teacher. She was thirty-three, divorced, and had an eight-year-old daughter named Laurel, who wasn’t at all charming; the girl wore thick glasses and usually stood behind, or right alongside, her mother. The child’s skin, in full sun, was as pale as sand. She often had rashes and mosquito bites that she scratched until they got scabs. Henry and Sally had become lovers a few months ago, and recently he had been staying with her at the loft she was subletting in SoHo. This week, she and Laurel had gone to visit her sister in Providence, but they were coming back for Carl’s birthday party, and in the morning the three of them would drive back to New York.

Henry looked out the other side of the porch. Gerald had gotten up and, with his gin-and-tonic mug in one hand, was fanning water out of a garden hose onto the roses.

“No!” Verna screamed, coming around the side of the house from the garden with a basket of freshly picked vegetables in one hand.

“Didn’t you see the white powder? For the aphids, Gerald. Don’t—”

Gerald turned the hose on Verna.

“Gerald!” she shrieked.

“How come you call him Henry darling and I’m just Gerald?” he said. “Showing preference damages children.”

“You’re insane,” Verna said, running toward the porch, cucumbers and lettuce spilling out of the basket.

Gerald was laughing loudly. Verna ran onto the porch, dropped the basket, and stomped into the kitchen. Henry considered going inside to find out if she still wanted him to love his brother. Gerald trained the hose on one chaise after another. Then he aimed it at the roses again, no longer laughing. His face had the rigidity of a soldier pointing a rifle. Henry watched until Gerald dropped the hose and headed for the spigot outside the porch to turn off the water.

“You’re losing it, darling,” Henry said.

Sally’s daughter, Laurel, was too shy to stand up with the rest of the group for a birthday toast. She was half under the picnic table, petting a neighbor’s cat.

“To me!” Carl said heartily, raising a thermos cap full of champagne.

Gerald had given him the thermos for his birthday. Carl was also wearing the swimming trunks, with knee-high black socks and black cordovans. “To the birthday boy at the end of his forty-ninth year, and”—he turned toward Sally—“to new friends.” He raised the cup higher. “To the sailboat I’m buying,” he said.

“What sailboat?” Verna said.

“A white one,” he said.

“You’re going to buy a sailboat?” Verna said.

“A white one,” he said.

“Telephone!” Gerald said, running down the lawn toward the house.

“Why not a sailboat?” Carl said. “Business was very good this year, considering. No one asks me how business is. It’s fine, thank you.” He raised his cup. He had still not had a drink of champagne. Sally sipped her champagne. Henry’s mug was empty. He walked over to the table, knocking the box top with the pieces of puzzle onto the lawn with his elbow as he took the bottle out of the cooler and poured. Champagne foamed out of his mug. He held it away from him, then licked his wrist.

“Excuse me,” Sally whispered to Henry. “I’m going to the bathroom.” She handed him her empty mug. Head down, she walked down the hill toward the house.

Carl, sitting on a chaise now, said, “I was really expecting a new sand wedge for my birthday.”

Verna sat on the bench by the picnic table. “Perhaps when Gerald gets back we should have the cake,” she said.

“I’ll get the cake,” Henry said, and walked toward the house. Laurel caught his eye and ran to his side when he opened the porch door. She was still holding the cat. It jumped out of her arms and ran under a bush. He wished she’d stayed with the others; he thought that Sally had gone to the bathroom because his family had made her uncomfortable, and he wanted to talk to her.

“Where’s Mommy?” Laurel said.

“In the bathroom,” he said, pointing.

“Anything. Anything, if only you’ll have me back,” Gerald was saying on the telephone. “Counseling—hell, I’d have electroshock therapy. Anything. Anything.”

Henry stood in the hallway, looking at his brother. Gerald looked at him and smiled. “Wrong number,” he said, and hung up.

“Mommy, the cat likes it here,” Laurel said, skipping to the bathroom door. “It didn’t go home or anything.”

The birthday cake was on the kitchen table, sitting on top of a paper doily on top of a footed cake stand—a tall chocolate cake, with “Happy Birthday” written in loopy white icing. A packet of candles and a book of matches lay beside it, ready for the occasion. Henry tapped out some candles and began to press the little wicks upright, stiffening them between his thumb and forefinger.

“Mommy, that cat has a real short tail,” Laurel said.

The telephone rang, and Henry picked it up.

“Gerald?” a woman said.

“No. This is Henry.”

“Henry—it’s Cora. Is Gerald there?”

“Did you just call?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I think he’s had a few drinks. Maybe you ought to call back later.”

“I should have known better. I’m at the emergency room, waiting to have a broken ankle set. I fell off a damned stone wall. I called to see if he had that card with the insurance-policy number on it.”

“Do you want me to go get him?” Henry said.

“No,” she said. “I just remembered that even on the rare occasions when I can communicate with him it’s never worth the price.” She hung up.

Laurel walked on her heels through the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “Mommy said I could play with the cat.” Henry heard the door slam. He continued to push wicks upright. Then he arranged the candles in two concentric circles. Sally had been in the bathroom too long. He went to the bathroom door.

“Sally,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“After we have the cake, let’s leave, O.K.?”

“This is the way families turn out,” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” he said.

“Rick got remarried this week. To that woman with the kid that we ran into on Sixth Avenue. Laurel hates the kid. She’s going to have to spend July with them.”

He put his fingertips to the door. “It’s only June,” he said.

Sally laughed.

“Sally,” he said.

“I don’t know how to act around your parents,” she said. “I’m not doing anything right.”

“You do more things right than anybody I can think of,” he said.

She sniffled. She had been crying. “What if I was really going to the bathroom? It would be embarrassing, with you standing right up against the door.”

“Nothing’s changed between us,” he said. “This is one day. My father’s in a bad mood. My brother’s nuts. I told you about my brother.”

“I have to pee,” she said. “Please get away from the door.”

Laurel was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, facing the table and the cake. “I wish I could have that cat,” she said.

Out the window Henry saw his father and brother wrestling. Verna was still on the bench, sipping champagne. The cat, standing by a tree, seemed to be watching what was going on. Henry saw Verna’s face turn stony; she put her mug on the table and smacked her hands. The cat ran away, taking high leaps like a rabbit moving through tall grass. He picked up more candles and poked them into the inner circle of the cake.

“I’m not afraid of matches,” Laurel said.

The birthday cake had gotten her attention. She swung her feet back and forth, eyes riveted on it. Her barrette had slipped; it was clamped below her ear, holding only a few strands of hair. Laurel picked up the book of matches. “Light one and give it to me,” she said.

He struck a match and held it out to her. For a second, her fingers touched his. They were so thin that it didn’t seem she could hold anything heavier than a match. He watched her, intent on seeing that she didn’t burn her fingers—so intent that the whole ring was aflame and the match blown out before he realized the problem. The inner circle of candles was unlit, and now there was no way to light them. She knew it, too. “What should I do?” she said softly.

“Hurry up,” he said, putting his hand on her back, tilting her forward. “Blow them out. Start again.”

Laurel took a deep breath and blew out half the candles. She sucked in her breath and blew again. The others went out, and a little blue cloud rose above the cake. When the candles didn’t flare up again—when he saw that this time they weren’t those joke candles that somehow reignite themselves after a few seconds—he crouched and put his arm around Laurel. Outside, the light had almost disappeared. No one was coming toward the house yet, but things wouldn’t stay the way they were much longer.

Heaven on a Summer Night

Will stood in the kitchen doorway. He seemed to Mrs. Camp to be a little tipsy. It was a hot night, but that alone wouldn’t account for his shirt, which was not only rumpled but hanging outside his shorts. Pens, a pack of cigarettes, and what looked like the tip of a handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket. Will tapped his fingertips on the pens. Perhaps he was not tapping them nervously but touching them because they were there, the way Mrs. Camp’s mother used to run her fingers over the rosary beads she always kept in her apron pocket. Will asked Mrs. Camp if she would cut the lemon pound cake she had baked for the morning. She thought that the best thing to do when a person had had too much to drink was to humor him, so she did. Everyone had little weaknesses, to be sure, but Will and his sister had grown up to be good people. She had known them since they were toddlers, back when she had first come to work for the Wildes here in Charlottesville. Will was her favorite, then and now, although Kate probably loved her more. Will was nineteen now, and Kate twenty. On the wall, above the sink, was a framed poem that Kate had written and illustrated when she was in the fifth grade:Like is a cookieLove is a cakeLike is a puddleLove is a lake

Years later, Will told her that Kate hadn’t made up the poem at all. It was something she had learned in school.

Mrs. Camp turned toward Will, who was sitting at the table. “When does school start?” she said.

“There’s a fly!” he said, dropping the slice of cake back onto his plate.

“What?” Mrs. Camp said. She had been at the sink, rinsing glasses before loading them into the dishwasher. She left the water running. The steam rose and thinned out as it floated toward the ceiling. “It’s a raisin,” she said. “You got me all worried about a raisin.”

He plucked some more raisins out of the pound cake and then took another bite.

“If you don’t want to talk about school, that’s one thing, but that doesn’t mean you should holler out that there’s a fly in the food,” Mrs. Camp said.

A year ago, Will had almost flunked out of college, in his sophomore year. His father had talked to the dean by long distance, and Will was allowed to continue. Now, in the summer, Mr. Wilde had hired Will a tutor in mathematics. Mornings and early afternoons, when Will was not being tutored or doing math problems, he painted houses with his friend Anthony Scoresso. Scoreboard and Will were going to drive to Martha’s Vineyard to paint a house there at the end of August. The house was unoccupied, and although she was a little hesitant about doing such a thing, Mrs. Camp was going to accept Will’s invitation to go with the boys and stay in the house for the week they were painting it. Scoreboard loved her cooking. She had never been to the Vineyard.

Now that they were older, Will and Kate included Mrs. Camp in many things. They had always told her everything. That was the difference between being who she was and being a parent—they knew that they could tell her anything. She never met one of their friends without hearing what Will or Kate called the Truth. That handsome blond boy, Neal, who told the long story about hitchhiking to the West Coast, Will told her later, was such a great storyteller because he was on speed. The girl called Natasha who got the grant to study in Italy had actually been married and divorced when she was eighteen, and her parents never even knew it. Rita, whom Mrs. Camp had known since first grade, now slept with a man as old as her father, for money. It pleased Kate and Will when a worried look came over Mrs. Camp’s face as she heard these stories. Years ago, when she told them once that she liked that old song by the Beatles, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Will announced gleefully that the Beatles were singing about a drug.

Kate’s car pulled into the driveway as Mrs. Camp was rinsing the last of the dishes. Kate drove a little white Toyota that made a gentle sound, like rain, as the tires rolled over the gravel. Will got up and pulled open the screen door for his sister on his way to the liquor cabinet. He poured some gin into a glass and walked to the refrigerator and added tonic water but no ice. In this sort of situation, Mrs. Camp’s mother would have advised keeping quiet and saying a prayer. Mrs. Camp’s husband—he was off on a fishing trip on the Chesapeake somewhere—would never advise her to pray, of course. Lately, if she asked him for advice about almost anything, his reply was “Get off my back.” She noticed that Will noticed that she was looking at him. He grinned at her and put down his drink so that he could tuck in his shirt. As he raised the shirt, she had a glimpse of his long, tan back and thought of the times she had held him naked as a baby—all the times she had bathed him, all the hours she had held the hose on him in the backyard. Nowadays, he and Scoreboard sometimes stopped by the house at lunchtime. With their sun-browned bodies flecked with paint, they sat at the table on the porch in their skimpy shorts, waiting for her to bring them lunch. They hardly wore any more clothes than Will had worn as a baby.

Kate came into the kitchen and dropped her canvas tote bag on the counter. She had been away to see her boyfriend. Mrs. Camp knew that men were always going to fascinate Kate, the way her tropical fish had fascinated her many summers earlier. Mrs. Camp felt that most men moved in slow motion, and that that was what attracted women. It hypnotized them. This was not the way men at work were. On the job, construction workers sat up straight and drove tractors over piles of dirt and banged through potholes big enough to sink a bicycle, but at home, where the women she knew most often saw their men, they spent their time stretched out in big chairs, or standing by barbecue grills, languidly turning a hamburger as the meat charred.

Kate had circles under her eyes. Her long brown hair was pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck. She had spent the weekend, as she had every weekend this summer, with her boyfriend, Frank Crane, at his condominium at Ocean City. He was studying for the bar exam. Mrs. Camp asked Kate how his studying was going, but Kate simply shook her head impatiently. Will, at the refrigerator, found a lime and held it up for them to see, very pleased. He cut off a side, squeezed lime juice into his drink, then put the lime back in the refrigerator, cut side down, on top of the butter-box lid. He hated to wrap anything in wax paper: Mrs. Camp knew that.

“Frank did the strangest thing last night,” Kate said, sitting down and slipping her feet out of her sandals. “Maybe it wasn’t strange. Maybe I shouldn’t say.”

“That’ll be the day,” Will said.

“What happened?” Mrs. Camp said. She thought that Frank was too moody and self-absorbed, and she thought that this was another story that was going to prove her right. Kate looked sulky—or maybe just more tired than Mrs. Camp had noticed at first. Mrs. Camp took a bottle of soda water out of the refrigerator and put it on the table, along with the lime and a knife. She put two glasses on the table and sat down across from Kate. “Perrier?” she said. Kate and Will liked her to call everything by its proper name, unless they had given it a nickname themselves. Secretly, she thought of it as bubble water.

“I was in his bedroom last night, reading, with the sheet pulled up,” Kate said. “His bathroom is across the hall from the bedroom. He went to take a shower, and when he came out of the bathroom I turned back the sheet on his side of the bed. He just stood there, in the doorway. We’d had a kind of fight about that friend of his, Zack. The three of us had gone out to dinner that night, and Zack kept giving the waitress a hard time about nothing. Sassing a waitress because a dab of ice cream was on the saucer when she brought it. Frank knew I was disgusted. Before he took his shower, he went into a big thing about how I wasn’t responsible for his friends’ actions, and said that if Zack had acted as bad as I said he did he’d only embarrassed himself.”

“If Frank passes the bar exam this time around, you won’t have anything to worry about,” Will said. “He’ll act nice again.”

Kate poured a glass of Perrier. “I haven’t told the story yet,” she said.

“Oh,” Will said.

“I thought everything between us was fine. When he stopped in the doorway, I put the magazine down and smiled. Then he said, ‘Kate—will you do something for me?’ ” Kate looked at Mrs. Camp, then dropped her eyes. “We were going to bed, you know,” she said. “I thought things would be better after a while.” Kate looked up. Mrs. Camp nodded and looked down. “Anyway,” Kate went on, “he looked so serious. He said, ‘Will you do something for me?’ and I said, ‘Sure. What?’ and he said, ‘I just don’t know. Can you think of something to cheer me up?’ ”

Will was sipping his drink, and he spilled a little when he started laughing. Kate frowned.

“You take everything so seriously,” Will said. “He was being funny.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Kate said softly.

“What did you do?” Mrs. Camp said.

“He came over to the bed and sat down, finally. I knew he felt awful about something. I thought he’d tell me what was the matter. When he didn’t say anything, I hugged him. Then I told him a story. I can’t imagine what possessed me. I told him about Daddy teaching me to drive. How he was afraid to be in the passenger seat with me at the wheel, so he pretended I needed practice getting into the garage. Remember how he stood in the driveway and made me pull in and pull out and pull in again? I never had any trouble getting into the garage in the first place.” She took another sip of Perrier. “I don’t know what made me tell him that,” she said.

“He was kidding. You said something funny, too, and that was that,” Will said.

Kate got up and put her glass in the sink. It was clear, when she spoke again, that she was talking only to Mrs. Camp. “Then I rubbed his shoulders,” she said. “Actually, I only rubbed them for a minute, and then I rubbed the top of his head. He likes to have his head rubbed, but he gets embarrassed if I start out there.”

Kate had gone upstairs to bed. Serpico was on television, and Mrs. Camp watched with Will for a while, then decided that it was time for her to go home. Here it was August 25th already, and if she started addressing Christmas cards tonight she would have a four-month jump on Christmas. She always bought cards the day after Christmas and put them away for the following year.

Mrs. Camp’s car was a 1977 Volvo station wagon. Mr. and Mrs. Wilde had given it to her in May, for her birthday. She loved it. It was the newest car she had ever driven. It was dark, shiny green—a color only velvet could be, the color she imagined Robin Hood’s jacket must have been. Mr. Wilde had told her that he was not leaving her anything when he died but that he wanted to be nice to her when he was above ground. A strange way to put it. Mrs. Wilde gave her a dozen pink Depression-glass wine goblets at the same time they gave her the car. There wasn’t one nick in any of the rims; the glasses were all as smooth as sea-washed stones.

As she drove, Mrs. Camp wondered if Will had been serious when he said to Kate that Frank was joking. She was sure that Will slept with girls. (Will was not there to rephrase her thoughts. He always referred to young girls as women.) He must have understood that general anxiety or dread Frank had been feeling, and he must also have known that having sex wouldn’t diminish it. It was also possible that Will was only trying to appear uninterested because Kate’s frank talk embarrassed him. “Frank talk” was a pun. Those children had taught her so much. She still felt a little sorry that they had always had to go to stuffy schools that gave them too much homework. She even felt sorry that they had missed the best days of television by being born too late: no Omnibus, no My Little Margie, no Our Miss Brooks. The reruns of I Love Lucy meant nothing to them. They thought Eddie Fisher’s loud tenor voice was funny, and shook their heads in disbelief when Lawrence Welk, looking away from the camera, told folks how nice the song was that had just been sung. Will and Kate had always found so many things absurd and funny. As children, they were as united in their giggling as they were now in their harsh dismissals of people they didn’t care for. But maybe this gave them an advantage over someone like her mother, who always held her tongue, because laughter allowed them to dismiss things; the things were forgotten by the time they ran out of breath.

In the living room, Mr. Camp was asleep in front of the television. Serpico was on. She didn’t remember the movie exactly, but she would be surprised if Al Pacino ever got out of his dilemma. She dropped her handbag in a chair and looked at her husband. It was the first time she had seen him in almost two weeks. Since his brother retired from the government and moved to a house on the Chesapeake, Mr. Camp hardly came home at all. Tonight, many cigarettes had been stubbed out in the ashtray on the table beside his chair. He had on blue Bermuda shorts and a lighter blue knit shirt, white socks, and tennis shoes. His feet were splayed on the footstool. When they were young, he had told her that the world was theirs, and, considering the world her mother envisioned for her—the convent—he’d been right. He had taught her, all in one summer, how to drive, smoke, and have sex. Later, he taught her how to crack crabs and how to dance a rumba.

It was eight o’clock, and outside the light was as blue-gray as fish scales. She went into the kitchen, tiptoeing. She went to the refrigerator and opened the door to the freezer. She knew what she would find, and of course it was there: bluefish, foil-wrapped, neatly stacked to within an inch of the top of the freezer. He had made room for all of them by removing the spaghetti sauce. She closed the door and pulled open the refrigerator door. There were the two containers. The next night, she would make up a big batch of spaghetti. The night after that, they would start eating the fish he’d caught. She opened the freezer door and looked again. The shining rectangles rose up like steep silver steps. The white air blowing off the ice, surrounding them and drifting out, made her squint. It might have been clouds, billowing through heaven. If she could shrink to a fraction of her size, she could walk into the cold, close the door, and start to climb.

She was tired. It was as simple as that. This life she loved so much had been lived, all along, with the greatest effort. She closed the door again. To hold herself still, she held her breath.

Times

It was almost Christmas, and Cammy and Peter were visiting her parents in Cambridge. Late in the afternoon on the second day of their visit, Cammy followed Peter upstairs when he went to take a shower. She wanted a break from trying to make conversation with her mother and father.

“Why is it that I always feel guilty when we’re not at my parents’ house at Christmas?” he said.

“Call them,” she said.

“That makes me feel worse,” he said.

He was looking in the mirror and rubbing his chin, though he had shaved just a few hours ago. Every afternoon, she knew, he felt for a trace of beard but didn’t shave again if he found it. “They probably don’t even notice we’re not there,” he said. “Who’d have time, with my sister and her au pair and her three kids and her cat and her dog and her rabbit.”

“Gerbil,” Cammy said. She sat at the foot of the bed while he undressed. Every year was the same; they offered to visit his parents in Kentucky, and his mother hinted that there was not enough room. The year before, he had said that they’d bring sleeping bags. His mother had said that she thought it was silly to have her family sprawled on the floor, and that they should visit at a more convenient time. Several days ago, before Cammy and Peter left New York for Boston, they had got presents in the mail from his parents. Each of them had been sent a Christmas stocking with a fake-fur top. Cammy’s stocking contained makeup. Peter’s was full of joke presents—a hand buzzer, soap that turned black when you washed your hands, a key chain with a dried yellow fish hanging from it. Peter’s stocking had had a hundred-dollar bill folded in the toe. In the toe of her stocking, Cammy found cuticle scissors.

While Peter showered, she wandered around her old room; when they arrived, they had been tired from the long drive, and she went to sleep with no more interest in her surroundings than she would have had in an anonymous motel room. Now she saw that her mother had got rid of most of the junk that used to be here, but she had also added things—her high-school yearbook, a Limoges dish with her Girl Scout ring in it—so that the room looked like a shrine. Years ago, Cammy had rolled little curls of Scotch Tape and stuck them to the backs of pictures of boyfriends or would-be boyfriends and then pushed the snapshots against the mirror to form the shape of a heart. Only two photos remained on the mirror now, both of Michael Grizetti, who had been her steady in her last year of high school. When her mother had moved them and put them neatly under the frame of the mirror, top left and right, she must have discovered the secret. Cammy pulled the larger picture out and turned it over. The hidden snapshot was still glued to the back: Grizzly with his pelvis thrust forward, thumbs pointing at his crotch, and the message “Nil desperandum x x x x x x x x x x” written on the snapshot across his chest. It all seemed so harmless now. He was the first person Cammy had slept with, and most of what she remembered now was what happened after they had sex. They went into New York, with fake IDs and fifty dollars Grizzly borrowed from his brother. She could still remember how the shag carpet tickled the soles of her feet when she went to the window of their hotel in the morning and pulled open the heavy curtains and looked across a distance so short that she thought she could reach out and touch the adjacent building, so close and so high that she couldn’t see the sky; there had been no way to tell what kind of day it was. Now she noticed that there was a little haze over Michael Grizetti’s top lip in the photograph. It was dust, not a mustache.

Peter came out of the bathroom. Over the years, he had gotten his hair cut closer and closer, so that now when she touched his head the curls were too tight to spring up at her touch. His head looked a little like a cantaloupe—a ridiculous idea, which would be useful just the same; she and her friends always said amusing things about their husbands when they wrote each other. She saved the more flattering images of him as things to say to him after making love. Her high-school English teacher would have approved. The teacher loved to invent little rhymes for the class:Your conversation can be terrific;Just remember: be specific

Peter’s damp towel flew past her and landed on the bed. As usual, he discarded it as if he had just finished it off in a fight. The week before, he had been in Barbados on a retreat with his company, and he was still very tan. There was a wide band of white skin where he had worn his swimming trunks. In the dim afternoon light he looked like a piece of Marimekko fabric.

He pulled on sweatpants, tied the drawstring, and lit a cigarette with the fancy lighter she had bought him for Christmas. She had given it to him early. It was a metal tube with a piece of rawhide attached to the bottom. When the string was pulled, an outer sleeve of metal rose over the top, to protect the flame. Peter loved it, but she was a little sorry after she gave it to him; there had been something dramatic about huddling in doorways with him, using her body to help him block the wind while he struck matches to light a cigarette. She took two steps toward him now and gave him a hug, putting her hands under his armpits. They were damp. She believed it was a truth that no man ever dried himself thoroughly after showering. He kissed across her forehead, then stopped and pushed his chin between her eyebrows. She couldn’t respond; she had told him the night before that she didn’t understand how anyone could make love in their parents’ house. He shook his head, almost amused, and tucked a thermal shirt into the sweatpants, then pulled on a sweater. “I don’t care if it is snowing,” he said. He was going running.

They walked downstairs. Her father, a retired cardiologist, was on his slant board in the living room, arms raised to heaven, holding the Wall Street Journal. “How do you reconcile smoking a pack a day, and then going running?” her father said.

“To tell you the truth,” Peter said, “I don’t run for my health. It clears my mind. I run because it gives me a high.”

“Well, do you think mental health is separate from the health of the body?”

“Oh, Stan,” Cammy’s mother said, coming into the living room, “no one is trying to argue with you about medicine.”

“I wasn’t talking about medicine,” he said.

“People just talk loosely,” her mother said.

“I’d never argue that point,” her father said.

Cammy found these visits more and more impossible. As a child she had been told what to do and think, and then when she got married her parents had backed off entirely, so that in the first year of her marriage she found herself in the odd position of advising her mother and father. Then, at some point, they had managed to turn the tables again, and now all of them were back to “Go.” They argued with each other and made pronouncements instead of having conversations.

She decided to go running with Peter and pulled her parka off a hanger in the closet. She was still having trouble zipping it outside, and Peter helped by pulling the material down tightly in front. It only made her feel more helpless. He saw her expression and nuzzled her hair. “What do you expect from them?” he said, as the zipper went up. She thought, He asks questions he knows I won’t bother to answer.

Snow was falling. They were walking through a Christmas-card scene that she hadn’t believed in in years; she half expected carolers around the corner. When Peter turned left, she guessed that they were heading for the park on Mass. Avenue. They passed a huge white clapboard house with real candles glowing in all the windows. “Some place,” Peter said. “Look at that wreath.” The wreath that hung on the front door was so thick that it was convex; it looked as if someone had uprooted a big boxwood and cut a hole in the center. Peter made a snowball and threw it, almost getting a bull’s-eye.

“Are you crazy?” she said, grabbing at his hand. “What are you going to do if they open the door?”

“Listen,” he said, “if they lived in New York the wreath would be stolen. This way, everybody can enjoy throwing snowballs at it.”

On the corner, a man stood staring down at a small brown dog wearing a plaid coat. The blond man standing next to him said, “I told you so. She may be blind, but she still loves it out in the snow.” The other man patted the shivering dog, and they continued on their walk.

Christmas in Cambridge. Soon it would be Christmas Eve, time to open the gifts. As usual, she and Peter would be given something practical (stocks), and something frivolous (glasses too fragile for the dishwasher). Then there would be one personal present for each of them: probably a piece of gold jewelry for Cammy and a silk tie for Peter. Cammy occasionally wore one of the ties when she dressed like a nineteen-forties businessman. Peter thought the ties were slightly effeminate—he never liked them. The year before, when her parents gave her a lapis ring, he had pulled it off her finger to examine it on Christmas night, in bed, then pushed it on his little finger and wiggled it, making a Clara Bow mouth and pretending to be gay. He had been trying to show her how ridiculous he would look wearing a wedding ring. They had been married three years then, and some part of her was still so sentimental that she asked him from time to time if he wouldn’t reconsider and wear a wedding ring. It wasn’t that she thought a ring would be any sort of guarantee. They had lived together for two years before they suddenly decided to get married, but before the wedding they had agreed that it was naive to expect a lifetime of fidelity. If either one became interested in someone else, they would handle the situation in whatever way they felt best, but there would be no flaunting of the other person, and they wouldn’t talk about it.

A couple of months before the last trip to her parents’—Christmas a year ago—Peter had waked her up one night to tell her about a young woman he had had a brief affair with. He described his feelings about being with the woman—how much he liked it when she put her hand over his when they sat at a table in a restaurant; the time she had dissipated some anger of his by suddenly putting her lips to the deepening lines in his forehead, to kiss his frown away. Then Peter had wept onto Cammy’s pillow. She could still remember his face—the only time she had ever seen him cry—and how red and swollen it was, as if it had been burned. “Is this discreet enough for you?” he had said. “Do you want to push this pillow into my face so not even the neighbors can hear?” She didn’t care what the neighbors thought, because she didn’t even know the neighbors. She had not comforted him or touched the pillow. She had not been dramatic and gone out to sleep on the sofa. After he went to work in the morning, she had several cups of coffee and then went out to try to cheer herself up. She bought flowers at an expensive flower shop on Greenwich Avenue, pointing to individual blossoms for the florist to remove one by one, choosing with great care. Then she went home, trimmed the stems, and put them in little bottles—just a few stalks in each, all flowers and no greens. By evening, when Peter was about to come home, she realized that he would see them and know that she had been depressed, so she bunched them all together again and put them in a vase in the dining room. Looking at them, she suddenly understood how ironic it was that all during the past summer, when she was falling more deeply in love with Peter, he was having a flirtation and then an affair with someone else. Cammy had begun to be comfortable with how subtly attuned to each other they were, and she had been deluded. It made her embarrassed to remember how close she felt to Peter late one fall afternoon on Bleecker Street, when Peter stopped to light a cigarette. Something had made her poke him in the ribs. She didn’t often act childish, and she could see that he was taken aback, and that made her laugh and poke him again. Every time he thought she’d finished and tried to light another match, she managed to take him by surprise and tickle him again; she even got through the barrier he’d made with his elbows pointed into his stomach. “What is this?” he said. “The American Cancer Society sent you to torture me?” People were looking—who said people don’t notice things in New York?—and Peter was backing away, then doubling up, with the cigarette unlit in his mouth, admitting that he couldn’t control her. When she moved toward him to hug him and end the game, he didn’t believe it was over; he turned sideways, one hand extended to ward her off, clumsily trying to thumb up a flame with his right hand. This was the opposite of the night she had sex with Michael Grizetti: she could remember all of this moment—the smiling fat woman walking by, talking to herself, the buzzing sound of the neon sign outside the restaurant, Peter’s stainless-steel watchband sparkling under the streetlight, the de-de-de-deeeeeeh of a car horn in the distance. “Time!” he had shouted, backing away. Then, at a safe distance, he crossed his fingers above his head, like a child.

Now Peter slapped her bottom. “I’m going to run,” he said. He took off into the park, his running shoes kicking up clods of snow. She watched him go. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his short leather jacket came just to his waist, so that he looked like an adolescent in ill-fitting clothes. She had on cowboy boots instead of running shoes. Why did she hold it against him that she had decided at the last minute to go with him and that she was wearing the wrong shoes? Did she expect him to throw down his cape?

She probably would not have thought of a cape at all, except that his scarf flew off as he ran, and he didn’t notice. She turned into the park to get it. The snow was falling in smaller flakes now; it was going to stay. Maybe it was the realization that even icier weather was still to come that suddenly made her nearly numb with cold. The desire to be in the sun was almost a hot spot between her ribs; something actually burned inside her. Like everyone she knew, she had grown up watching Porky Pig and Heckle and Jeckle on Saturday mornings—cartoons in which the good guys got what they wanted and no consequences were permanent. Now she wanted one of those small tornadoes that whipped through cartoons, transporting objects and characters with miraculous speed from one place to another. She wanted to believe again in the magic power of the wind.

They went back to the house. Music was playing loudly on the radio, and her father was hollering to her mother, “First we get that damned ‘Drummer Boy’ dirge, and now they’ve got the Andrews Sisters singing ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.’ What the hell does that have to do with Christmas? Isn’t that song from the Second World War? What are they doing playing that stuff at Christmas? Probably some disc jockey that’s high. Everybody’s high all the time. The guy who filled my gas tank this morning was high. The kid they put on to deliver mail’s got eyes like a pinwheel and walks like he might step on a land mine. What about ‘White Christmas’? Do they think that Bing Crosby spent his whole life playing golf ?”

Peter came up behind Cammy as she was hanging his scarf on a peg on the back of the kitchen door. He helped her out of her coat and hung it over the scarf.

“Look at this,” Cammy’s mother said proudly, from the kitchen.

They walked into the room where her mother stood and looked down. While they were out, she had finished making the annual bûche de Noël: a fat, perfect cylinder of a log, with chocolate icing stroked into the texture of tree bark. A small green-and-white wreath had been pumped out of a pastry tube to decorate one end, and there was an open jar of raspberry jam that her mother must have used to make the bow.

“It was worth my effort,” her mother said. “You two look like children seeing their presents on Christmas morning.”

Cammy smiled. What her mother had just said was what gave her the idea of touching the Yule log—what made her grin and begin to wiggle her finger lightly through a ridge, widening it slightly, giving the bark at least one imperfection. Once her finger touched it, it was difficult to stop—though she knew she had to let the wild upsweep of the tornado she might create stay an image in her mind. The consolation, naturally, was what would happen when she raised her finger. Slowly—while Peter and her mother stared—she lifted her hand, still smiling, and began to suck the chocolate off her finger.

In the White Night

“Don’t think about a cow,” Matt Brinkley said. “Don’t think about a river, don’t think about a car, don’t think about snow. . . .”

Matt was standing in the doorway, hollering after his guests. His wife, Gaye, gripped his arm and tried to tug him back into the house. The party was over. Carol and Vernon turned to wave goodbye, calling back their thanks, whispering to each other to be careful. The steps were slick with snow; an icy snow had been falling for hours, frozen granules mixed in with lighter stuff, and the instant they moved out from under the protection of the Brinkleys’ porch the cold froze the smiles on their faces. The swirls of snow blowing against Carol’s skin reminded her—an odd thing to remember on a night like this—of the way sand blew up at the beach, and the scratchy pain it caused.